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the boy's all about burning
Jul. 29th, 2004 10:17 amThe other day I found this scrumpled up in the bottom of my backpack, and realized that I'd never posted my review of /The Lady's Not For Burning./ A terrible oversight for a critic. (Sigh.) So here it is.
* * * * * *
You never know with theatre, and you particularly never know with plays set six hundred years before they were written. (The script notes that the setting is "as much fourteenth century as anything else.") Langham Court's production of /The Lady's Not For Burning/ surpassed all my hopes for a pleasantly nostalgically mediocre evening at the playhouse.
It was magnificent. The performance was good, sometimes very good, and solid throughout. But it was Fry's script (albeit considerably abridged) that possessed me through the rabble of voices. Even now, reading through the playscript, having heard it for the first and only time tonight, I can easily find the lines that echo in my head, as though I knew it by heart.
Fry's ear is almost flawless. His rhythm is more Shakespearean than Miracle Play, but the dialogue works perfectly both as a period piece and as modern wit.
Apparently it was written more to reflect the disillusion and alienation of returning servicemen after WWII than about McCarthyism, as compared to its most obvious counterpart, /The Crucible/. Under the current circumstances, however, the witch-hunting aspect was scathing, the soldier's anguish more mute. The play is a light thing compared to the burden of the history that we are creating for ourselves right now, but it was hard not to hear, in the maddening nonsensicality of the Mayor's determination to find Jennet out as a witch, echoes (faint, compared to the pandemonium of the truth) of the grotesque new anti-terrorist laws.
In Fry's play, all human systems are useless in the end to cope with human failings. Religion leads to atrocities like the persecution of Jennet. Laws lead to the decree that she, clearly innocent, must die, and Thomas, insisting on his guilt, must live. Science leads Jennet's father into delusion and death; and her own rationality fails her, because other people refuse to behave rationally. Beyond the usual potshots at organized religion and bureaucracy, Fry attacks the self-involvement of Polite Society, which doesn't want witch-burning to upset its supper, and even love, when it is disguised self-interest.
There's no redemption in the play, no finding your lost Dog, not even hope. The hero ends as he begins, despising the world:
THOMAS
Do you see those roofs and spires?
There sleeps hypocrisy, porcous pomposity, greed,
Lust, vulgarity, cruelty, trickery, sham,
And all possible nitwittery
The only consolation is the love of someone like-minded. And whatever else mygh be hypothesized, this is the only truth I've been able to confirm in the experiment of my life. And so the play ends on a note of hopeless hope -- Hope not in humanity, or fate, or Dog, but in one equally beloved, equally disgusted, equally cynical partner.
I want to play Thomas Mendip! I want to play him more bitter and less antic than the (very good) performance I saw at Langham court. I want to show his exhaustion, his fury at humanity's failure to be good or even compassionate, and of his own conscience. Not too heavy-handed, mind you. But if it isn't cn his dialogue, I want all the hells of war to echo in his voice. He's the messenger of despair defeated but never conquered by love.
--rf
* * * * * *
You never know with theatre, and you particularly never know with plays set six hundred years before they were written. (The script notes that the setting is "as much fourteenth century as anything else.") Langham Court's production of /The Lady's Not For Burning/ surpassed all my hopes for a pleasantly nostalgically mediocre evening at the playhouse.
It was magnificent. The performance was good, sometimes very good, and solid throughout. But it was Fry's script (albeit considerably abridged) that possessed me through the rabble of voices. Even now, reading through the playscript, having heard it for the first and only time tonight, I can easily find the lines that echo in my head, as though I knew it by heart.
Fry's ear is almost flawless. His rhythm is more Shakespearean than Miracle Play, but the dialogue works perfectly both as a period piece and as modern wit.
Apparently it was written more to reflect the disillusion and alienation of returning servicemen after WWII than about McCarthyism, as compared to its most obvious counterpart, /The Crucible/. Under the current circumstances, however, the witch-hunting aspect was scathing, the soldier's anguish more mute. The play is a light thing compared to the burden of the history that we are creating for ourselves right now, but it was hard not to hear, in the maddening nonsensicality of the Mayor's determination to find Jennet out as a witch, echoes (faint, compared to the pandemonium of the truth) of the grotesque new anti-terrorist laws.
In Fry's play, all human systems are useless in the end to cope with human failings. Religion leads to atrocities like the persecution of Jennet. Laws lead to the decree that she, clearly innocent, must die, and Thomas, insisting on his guilt, must live. Science leads Jennet's father into delusion and death; and her own rationality fails her, because other people refuse to behave rationally. Beyond the usual potshots at organized religion and bureaucracy, Fry attacks the self-involvement of Polite Society, which doesn't want witch-burning to upset its supper, and even love, when it is disguised self-interest.
There's no redemption in the play, no finding your lost Dog, not even hope. The hero ends as he begins, despising the world:
THOMAS
Do you see those roofs and spires?
There sleeps hypocrisy, porcous pomposity, greed,
Lust, vulgarity, cruelty, trickery, sham,
And all possible nitwittery
The only consolation is the love of someone like-minded. And whatever else mygh be hypothesized, this is the only truth I've been able to confirm in the experiment of my life. And so the play ends on a note of hopeless hope -- Hope not in humanity, or fate, or Dog, but in one equally beloved, equally disgusted, equally cynical partner.
I want to play Thomas Mendip! I want to play him more bitter and less antic than the (very good) performance I saw at Langham court. I want to show his exhaustion, his fury at humanity's failure to be good or even compassionate, and of his own conscience. Not too heavy-handed, mind you. But if it isn't cn his dialogue, I want all the hells of war to echo in his voice. He's the messenger of despair defeated but never conquered by love.
--rf
