To Have the Honour - A A Milne

 You see the name A A Milne, you think Pooh, you perhaps think Toad of Toad Hall.   You almost certainly don't think witty grown-up West End comedies, yet it was as a playwright that Milne made his name and, no doubt, much of his money.

To Have the Honour was premiered at Wyndham's in the autumn of 1924, produced by and starring Sir Gerald du Maurier,, manager of Wyndham's and father of Daphne.   Du Maurier, in his fiftieth year, plays a matinee idol Balkan prince who finds himself a weekend guest in English surbubia and who turns out to be not or who he seems to be.

The plot is paper-thin but that doesn't matter.   This is a comedy of manners and, most interestingly, an exploration of assumed identity, the face we put on to both impress our peers and to cover own insecurities.

Angela Battersby has met Prince Michael in Monte Carlo, as you do, and has invited him to drop in at her father's house in leafy Wych Trentham if he happens to be in the area.    So he does.  Angela hurriedly scrapes together a dinner party of friends she thinks will be impressed.   But one of them recognises the imposter.   This moment, the exact midpoint of the play, is a total reversal of our expectations.   Far from exposing the fraud, the one in the know turns out to be another fraud and together they plot their way out of the situation.   They also turn out to be married to one another, a plot twist that should be preposterous and yet, with Milne's exquisite touch, seems unremarkable.

JenniferBulger, the wife the fake prince deserted, is content with her life as a non-existant general's widow in Wych Trentham, so Prince Michael - plain Michael Brown - has to make his excuses and leave.  He doesn't want to - he wants to be with Jennifer again - and so builds another fake story to explain the first.   It unravels in Act Three but still contrives to end happily.

Could To Have the Honour be successfully revived today?  I think so.   The issues - outward show, royalty in the modern monarchy, even a hint of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - are all relevant, and Milne is not as mannered as Coward.   In its way it is of-its-time as a Restoration Comedy and could be revived simply as an excellent period piece.

Southwark Fair - Samuel Adamson

 Samuel Adamson is an Australian playwright who has been living and working in London since the early Nineties.  Southwark Fair was produced at the National Theatre in 2006 with Rory Kinnear in the lead.  It is a London slice-of-life comedy, very much of its time.  That time was when being gay or from Eastern Europe was the biggest thing hip young Londoners had to worry about.  Things have changed so much in the last decade that Southwark Fair is now a period piece every bit as historical as The Importance of Being Earnest or The Way of the World.  Like them, it offers a snapshot of happier, better times.  Producers should consider reviving it if theatres ever reopen.  It is genuinely funny, with interesting characters and a clever structure which goes through scenes we have already seen from the other point of view (which could be off-putting were it not so brilliantly done).  I am neither gay nor from overseas and have never lived in London, or wanted to.  Yet I genuinely enjoyed reading Southwark Fair and would happily pay money to see it onstage.

The Alchemist - Ben Jonson

I have never really got on with Jonson. Too much allegedly clever cant for my taste. However, this Revels edition from the Manchester University Press managed to keep my attention and I really came to enjoy it. It's an academic edition so there are inevitably lots of footnotes. As an academic of drama as opposed to a student of language, I felt able to ignore these and concentrate on the key element of any farce (an element often overlooked), which is - is it funny? And by and large, yes it is. In this edition, rather than other versions I have tackled, the momentum is kept going and the unity of place and time underlined by using the French method of scene structure - that is to say, a new scene every time someone new comes onstage. The Alchemist is a play about coming and going, and Act V in particular would be hard going if it wasn't broken down into scenes. This way, the rather improbable ending becomes very funny indeed.

It is interesting how Jonson is able to do without many stage directions. Anything we need to know is referenced in the dialogue. Whilst we're at it, the dialogue is in verse and therefore metrical but Jonson uses broken meter to set up arguments and verbal interplay. I have to say I was impressed.

I was not at all impressed with the introduction by E H Mares. Mine is a vintage edition and the 'critical apparatus' as it is quaintly termed dates from 1967. The problem, I think, is that it predates meaningful theatre study in UK universities.  I was part of the first generation to be able to do all four of my degrees specifically in drama. That said, I was seeing a lot of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in and around 1967 and I didn't come across anyone trying to do it on a proscenium stage. Certainly, no one would countenance doing it that way now. Yet Mares goes on for page after page describing how to compromise the action onto a box set. Tedious and irrelevant, as was the history of performances in butchered formats which, from Garrick on, focussed on one of the dupes, the tobacco seller Abel Drugger, rather than the con men Subtle and Face and their moll Doll Common. Still, that's the great advantage of introductions; if they don't hit their mark they are easily ignored.