Theatre
Nasty stars
Peter Jenkins
The Double Dealer (Olivier, NT) A preface to a 1948 edition of Congreve's plays held it to be 'unlikely that The Double Dealer will ever be successfully revived'. The grounds for this opinion were that the play, Congreve's second, is an indigestible mixture of two conventions, the one satirical and the other melodramatic. On the one hand we have a gaggle of gullibles — Lord and Lady Froth, Sir Paul and Lady Plyant and Brisk, 'a pert coxcomb' — and on the other hand an innocent couple of lovers, Mellefont and Cynthia, and an unmistakable villain in Maskwell, the Double Dealer himself, who serves— in more than one sense — a predatory seductress, Lady Touchwood. The entire action takes place on a single day in the gallery of Lord Touchwood's house as Maskwell sets about estranging the young lovers and procuring Mellefont for his own mistress of whom, in any case, he has had enough.
The play depends upon one accepting the convention that other people's infidelities are a huge joke while to be a cuckold knowingly is a disgraceful humiliation. There are two views, broadly, about Congreve: one is that he is a rather shocking immoralist and the other is that he is a bit of a bore. I belong to the latter school. Slick and stylish to be sure, devastatingly accurate in his portrayal of the upper-class society of the times, witty enough in the mechanical fashion of those times, a master at getting them on and off, but when all that has been said, a bore he is because of the shallowness of his concerns and the triviality of his universe. The people who conduct their lecherous romp in Lord Touchwood's gallery and its adjoining bedrooms are pretty nasty types, upper-class asses and decadents, about whom it is hard to care a jot and at whom it is difficult to laugh for very long.
Nevertheless, here is a glossy, starstudded production, actors' theatre at its highest, and for people who don't much care what they, are seeing provided it is being acted by Ralph Richardson, Dorothy Tutin and Robert Stephens it makes an • ideal evening. Peter Wood, who directs, largely overcomes the problem of the two conventions, if real problem it is, by tempering the cruelty of the satire and gently satirising the melodrama. That is all right but if you do that you lose something of the abysmal nastiness of the people which was brought out so brilliantly in the recent production of The Way of the World by the Royal Shakespeare Company. However, if the purpose of a play is to serve as a vehicle — a good old Shaftesbury Avenue word, that — for stars, you don't want too much nastiness or indeed too much of anything which might get in the way of 'performances'.
For me, therefore, the production was too bland, and too slow as well, but it was done with marvellous elegance on a set by Tanya Moisewitsch which made best use yet of the expanse of the Olivier arena and its revolving stage. It was a perfect replica of a seventeenth-century gallery, with double staircase, all panelled in light oak. Sunlight streamed in through high windows and wonder of wonders — there's nothing they can't do at the National —moved around the stage with the clock until it was shining in from over our heads through an invisible window. The costumes, too, also by Miss Moisewitsch, were stylish in the extreme and looked to be of expense befitting the National Theatre (I am afraid I do give a taxpayer's wince from time to time at National Theatre productions.) Robert Stephens, clearly right back in form, made Maskwell into more than a stage villain, rather into a type which reminded one of those upper-class cads whose languid drawl, with a hint of genetic speech impediment, used to add to the gaiety of the King's Road and perhaps still does. Stephens had the air of a man so exhausted by the tedium of his life that he has scarcely enough energy left to lower his trousers.
Dorothy Tutin, as Lady Plyant, gave a star performance as Dorothy Tutin as Lady Ply ant. The audience enjoyed it and she does have one very good scene in which her lust for Mellefont vies with her celibate pose. Michael Bryant turned Sir Paul Plyant from the butt of the cruel cuckold joke into a touching figure, sadly deprived of sex and son-and-heir. Nothing can be done with Mellefont, who is a characterless and dreamy young gallant, or stud, but John Harding looked the part well enough. There is nothing much for Cynthia either except to look pretty, which Judi Bowker did. But everybody was good, as befits a star production of a trivial play, and if anybody stole one from the superstars it was Nicky Henson who made Brisk into the acme of the mannered ape.
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