Long Read: On "Testament" by Sam Edmunds

Blog-ish first draft of a piece published in London Theatre Reviews May 17th 2019 (http://www.londontheatrereviews.co.uk/post.cfm?p=1272)

Performed by Chalk Line Theatre at the Hope Theatre, May 16th 2019

“I am a man. A failed man.” says Nicholas Shalebridge’s Max as Testament begins. He emerges a solitary, pitifully isolated figure out of total darkness onto a minimal set draped in foreboding light and sound. It is a small, intimate space transformed by Becca White’s superlative set design and Alan Walden’s sound into a ward, with a hospital’s sterility and stillness, broken only by a languid, sedated light, made cold, harsh, distant, and yet longing to be warm and full.

Fitting that this tableau prepares us, in its way, for writer-director Sam Edmund’s Testament, performed in support of the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM), a charity doing outstanding work for the cause of male mental health and suicide prevention. His is a story of cruelly subdued light, purloined warmth, and the terrible human cost of the failure to allow light to shine. 

Shalebridge’s Max, confined to a psychiatric ward under care after having tried to commit suicide following the terrible car accident which killed his beloved girlfriend Tess (Jessica Frances), and in paroxysms of repressed guilt and shame, descends into the depths of serious mental illness whilst his dedicated doctor (Shireenah Ingram) tries everything she can to help bring him back from the brink. As the traumatised Max begins to seek answers in conversations with Jesus (David Angland) and finds himself beset by harrowing visitations from Lucifer (Daniel Leadbitter), his only salvation from personal hell – and hope of living through traumatic brain injury -lies with his brother Chris (William Shackleton).

Through playwright Edmund’s incisive, ingenious lens of traumatic – indeed, life-threatening - brain injury as metaphor for the chronic, deadly horrors wrought by toxic masculinity, there follows an hour of tightly paced, skilfully directed and wonderfully acted human drama on the perils of performing manhood, and with it, the very real, myriad emotional and psychological harms of denying vulnerability, demanding a crassly misogynistic, tough-guy laddish-ness of all young boys and men, and ultimately, the cruel, unjust failure to allow ourselves and each other to be fully, authentically human.

Left: Nicholas Shalebridge as Max. Credit: Lidia Crisafulli

His wonderfully observant, witty, and incisive writing – itself a highlight of the performance - crackles with a macabre energy and pathos, filled with delightful wordplay and lyrical flourishes in the dour refrains of the oft-repeated great lies, now recast – more accurately - as the mad, angry delusions of a pitiable husk of brutalised humanity in crippling pain: “I am a man.” “I’m fine.” 

As the plot homes in on Max’s brain damage, so the writing performs surgical incision into the fundamental brokenness of the performatively male mind. The gorgeous penmanship is ably accompanied by William Harrison’s beautiful tapestry of sound, Alan Walden’s erratic, strobing lights driven to madness with straining to shine freely, and Becca White’s gracefully fluid, minimal set, able to transform on a coin-turn into a procession of grim, darkly comical tableaus of that particularly pitiable, pathetic, pretended manhood in focus; recollections of Max with his friends at home all energetically getting ready for a night out on the pull in the club betray the stifling, lunatic misogyny of all laddish ritual; the club itself, a miserable purgatory of incessant noise and light where no-one can ever really be heard, and which physically forces Max and Tess apart on their first meeting – throngs of other men drawing him away from an avatar of femininity itself, and leaving him struggling to meaningfully connect with that energy - evokes and exposes the hellish environs in which, says Max, “Men are crushed by men.”.

Even in the happy memories of his lost relationship interspersed throughout, he is deeply insecure about his manhood, his attempts at genuine affection and declarations of love habitually eliding into grand pronouncements of heroic might and manliness in the mould of Gladiator’s Maximus, under the glare of the spotlight and a watchful audience – feeling, perhaps, as so many men do, that he is endlessly judged by dozens of cold, pitiless male eyes ready to denounce him as not man enough at any moment. 

For him, there can be no Maximus Decimus Meridius. There is only Mad Max. All, finally, always leading back to the mental hospital - and to brokenness, desperate delusion, suicidality, and insanity, with Max pulled back and forth like a puppet on strings in visually striking and skilful moments of physical theatre, all by way of Edmund and his fellow guiding hand Harrison’s superb direction and staging.

Such powerful, politically charged and poignant scenes are brought to vivid life by a troupe of skilled and accomplished East 15 alumni. Lead Nicholas Shalebridge is outstanding as Max, with a commanding and compelling stage presence underscored by moving sincerity, vulnerability, and emotional range. As an avatar of male vulnerability in full relief, he gets some wonderful, heart-breaking, sympathetic monologues and great moments of emotional turmoil which make for stirring and thought-provoking viewing. 

His stage brother William Shackleton, in the course of his own emotionally impactful and sobering character arc, uses an affecting, contrastingly understated performance to drive at a genuine fraternal love and care, towards the need for all men to really connect with one another in times of crisis, whilst his character’s sincere efforts are undercut by his own unaddressed neuroses and need for outreach, reminding us all of our common blind spot as men; that we are too often busied appearing as a pillar of strength for others to make time to address our own emotional needs, and that this must change, making for wonderful work from Shackleton.

Credit: Lidia Crisafulli

Shireenah Ingram lends a distinctive and valuable stage presence to The Doctor, cutting a sympathetic, distressed figure visibly taxed with Max’s protestations against treatment, even as he languishes quarantined in a mental hospital. It is regrettable that she is one of the only central ethnic minority cast members on stage, although the fact that a woman of colour nevertheless acts, in her way, as the avatar of feminist impulses and as a guide for the broken Max, and indeed Chris, out of the choking mire of toxic masculinity towards emotional openness and an acceptance of the need for help, is strikingly significant by itself, lending her solid performance and the play’s strong writing all the more thematic and meta-textual strength and appreciable impact for her being here.

Meanwhile, David Angland is a revelation as Christ, filled with a boundless, infectious energy and zeal simultaneously contrasted with a sinister undertone of self-centeredness, cynicism and cruelty, preaching ignorance of pain, the virtues of depression pill-popping, and telling Max not to waste the time of the doctors. His is an accomplished, dark reflection of the futility of getting around the fundamental need for men to talk without recourse to religion or medicine, and he is never anything but an involving, contagious joy to watch. 

His counterpart, Daniel Leadbitter’s Lucifer is an intriguingly dark messiah on Max’s shoulder, driving him to paranoia, further madness, deeper depression, and desperate bargaining. Both give triumphant turns in their roles, and each lends themselves well to smaller roles as suitably dreadful ‘lad’ stereotypes elsewhere.

Last, but certainly not least of all, Jessica Frances capably performs an endearingly lively Tess, if one somewhat, perhaps fittingly, relegated to the margins; hers is a haunting absent presence, more of a Lost Lenore in the abstract than any fully realised character all her own – but, one gathers, such is life for women in the aggressively homosocial domain of men, forever trying to show off masculine credentials to other lads, and hopelessly struggling to achieve an impossible standard of manliness. 

She exists, poignantly, only as the idea of a girlfriend, as a broken man’s fading, idealised memory, with no full recognition of femininity as fellow humanity from any of the men until it is far too late for all involved. A grim commentary from Edmunds, perhaps, in our age of young men’s online radicalisation, on the human consequences of men’s failure to find alternative emotional outlets and a means of healthy expression of feelings beyond the confines of romantic love and the deleterious idea of some material need to have a girlfriend not only to “be a man”, but to be in safe, pre-approved proximity to the feminine at all. That she is a woman literally killed by men showing off to each other in Max’s precious car – one named after a woman, no less, seemingly stressing notions of woman as a male object in their cloistered, hyper-masculine world - cannot be insignificant. It’s a solid, haunting performance, bolstering an outstanding work further still.

Credit: Lidia Crisafulli


Testament is a beautifully written, staged, and performed work in every aspect, absolutely worth the price of admission and a night out. In itself, such accomplished writing from a man is a bracing appeal to our shared humanity and capacity for soulful creativity. It wasn’t so long ago, after all, in the Victorian era of Muscular Christianity that laid the historical foundations of modern toxic masculinity (witness Max’s significant conversations with the uncharacteristically cynical and dismissive Jesus Christ), that to be a male writer was to be shunned and despised for staying at home, and thus venturing too close to the feminine domestic sphere for other men’s comfort.

In this, Sam Edmunds’ work, and the efforts of all his talented cast and crew, is a marvellous, triumphant refutation of male flight from femininity and a passionate cri de Coeur for a broad expansion of what it is to be a man of the world. It is not acceptable to Edmunds that Max is stripped of fundamental humanity, reduced, as women so often are, to a product, to “A dad’s son, a boy who was raised to be a man.” Instead, he demands an acceptance of the vulnerability of men, an allowance for their failures, and licence to simply be people.

Perhaps Max, in the play’s first gripping moments, puts it best:

“I am a man. A failed man. A hu-man.”

Review: Testament by Sam Edmunds

Originally published in London Theatre Reviews, May 17th 2019 (http://www.londontheatrereviews.co.uk/post.cfm?p=1272)

Performed by Chalk Line Theatre at the Hope Theatre, May 16th 2019

“I am a man. A failed man.” says Nicholas Shalebridge’s Max as Testament begins. He emerges a solitary, pitifully isolated figure out of total darkness into a small, intimate space transformed by superlative set design, lighting and sound into a rich, compelling, and deeply personal story of lost light, and the terrible human cost of the failure to allow it to shine.

Shalebridge’s Max, confined to a psychiatric ward under care after having tried to commit suicide following the terrible car accident which killed his beloved girlfriend Tess (Jessica Frances), and in paroxysms of repressed guilt and shame, descends into the depths of serious mental illness whilst his dedicated doctor (Shireenah Ingram) tries everything she can to help bring him back from the brink. As the traumatised Max begins to seek answers in conversations with Jesus (David Angland) and finds himself beset by harrowing visitations from Lucifer (Daniel Leadbitter), his only salvation from personal hell – and hope of living through traumatic brain injury -lies with his brother Chris (William Shackleton).

Edmunds’ wonderfully observant, witty, and incisive writing – itself a highlight of the performance - crackles with a macabre energy and pathos, filled with delightful wordplay and lyrical flourishes in the dour refrains of the oft-repeated great lies, now recast – more accurately - as the mad, angry delusions of a pitiable husk of brutalised humanity in crippling pain: “I am a man.” “I’m fine.”
The gorgeous penmanship is ably accompanied by William Harrison’s beautiful tapestry of sound, Alan Walden’s erratic, strobing lights driven to madness with straining to shine freely, and Becca White’s gracefully fluid, minimal set, able to transform on a coin-turn into a memorable, evocative procession of grim, darkly comical tableaus of pretentious, unhealthy masculinity, all by way of Edmund and his fellow guiding hand Harrison’s superb direction and staging.

Credit: Lidia Crisafulli

Lead Nicholas Shalebridge is outstanding as Max, with a commanding and compelling stage presence underscored by moving sincerity, vulnerability, and emotional range, getting some wonderful, heart-breaking, sympathetic monologues and great moments of emotional turmoil which make for stirring and thought-provoking viewing. His stage brother William Shackleton meanwhile gives an affecting, contrastingly understated performance full of a drive towards fraternal love and care, tragically undercut by his own two-minded neuroses, and Shireenah Ingram lends a distinctive and valuable stage presence to The Doctor, cutting a sympathetic, distressed figure struggling with them both.

In amongst the many other highlights of a hugely talented and capable East 15 ensemble, David Angland is a revelation as Christ, filled with a boundless, infectious energy and zeal that proves an involving, contagious joy to watch whilst his evil counterpart, Daniel Leadbitter’s Lucifer, is a deliciously dark presence, playing the devil on Max’s shoulder against Christ’s angel, and driving the broken boy to paranoia, further madness, deeper depression, and desperate bargaining. Both give triumphant turns in their roles, and each lends themselves well to their smaller parts as suitably dreadful ‘lad’ stereotypes elsewhere.

Jessica Frances also capably performs an endearingly lively Tess, if one somewhat relegated to the margins as a haunting absent presence; more of a Lost Lenore in the abstract than any fully realised character, mostly existing, poignantly, only as the idea of a girlfriend, and as Max’s fading, idealised memories. From this, a strong and disconcerting performance emerges which encourages sober, instructive reflection, in its way, on the fact of there being no full recognition of femininity as shared humanity from any of the men, either in post-mortem imagination or in her real life, until it is far too late for almost all involved.

Testament is, all told, a beautifully written, staged, and performed work in every aspect, absolutely worth the price of admission and a night out. Edmunds’ powerful writing and his cast’s superlative performances in support of the fine male suicide-prevention work of CALM make for a marvellous, triumphant refutation of male flight from femininity and a passionate cri de Coeur for a broader definition of what it is to be a man of the modern world. It unflinchingly demands an acceptance of the vulnerability of men, an allowance for their failures, and licence to simply be people. In fewer words, perhaps Max, in the play’s first gripping moments, puts it best:

“I am a man. A failed man. A hu-man.”

Credit: Lidia Crisafulli

Pygmalion in Rehearsal, 3/5 – “King Enough For Me” – Part 4

In a huge Edwardian role-reversal by Shaw, Freddy is a very feminine, heterosocial man, totally subservient to Eliza, content to spend their married life being the one bringing his wife her slippers whilst Eliza goes out to work for their income, and far from having a broad knowledge or education or any practical life skill, is seemingly not fit for anything more trying than being a devoted, loving husband. Nor does Freddy have any interest in displaying any of the brutish, domineering manliness of toxic masculinity: instead, “he loves her unaffectedly, and is not her master, nor ever likely to dominate her in spite of his advantage of social standing”. Unlike his contemporary fellow men, expected to brandish their strength to control their wives in the home, he recognises and embraces the strength of Eliza to sustain their marriage. Unable to cope with life by himself, Freddy, and men like him, are assured by Shaw that “though they may fail in emergencies, life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out”. For Freddy, Eliza’s strength of character is enough to see them through both of their lifetimes without too much hardship.

Contrary to the misguided beliefs of those that think Higgins should win Eliza in the end simply by virtue of being the designated male lead of the play, Shaw maintains that, with her newfound self-respect, Eliza refuses to be subjected to a lifetime of endless demeaning comparisons to Higgins’ mother, and considers it far beneath her dignity to be made some sort of substitute for Mrs. Higgins when she could instead have a man like Freddy devotedly treating her not only like a lady, but most importantly, as an individual and as a human being instead of a phonetics experiment or a “living doll”, as she feels she deserves to be treated by an ideal man. It matters not that Freddy fails as a powerful physical specimen, or that he lacks gumption, for as Shaw puts it, “Strong people do not marry stronger people[…]The man or woman who feels strong enough for two, seeks for every other quality in a partner than strength.”

Freddy and Eliza flee the watchful eyes of the police through the night-time streets of London.

For Shaw to even suggest the idea, let alone put into writing in the face of so much contemporary anti-Suffragist sentiment, and prevailing Muscular Christianity’s insistence that men were in every sense superior to women that it is, indeed, “a truth everywhere in evidence” that Eliza is more a man than Freddy, and that a woman could ever prove stronger and more powerful than a man in any circumstance would have been anathema in his time, and yet it remains a startlingly relevant, controversial view in our own modern era. There are, doubtless, many men, even today, that would be intimidated by the prospect of being somehow bested by a woman, much less be willing to settle into a long and happy marriage with one that outclasses them in almost every meaningful aspect of life. That foundational Victorian Masculinity has lingered so long in our socio-cultural consciousness that many would still consider Freddy’s untrammelled depth of feeling and feminine disposition a threatening affront to proper manhood. After all: all men absolutely must at all times be on a war footing, always ready to use violence, ever-prepared to go to war in an instant, never showing any vulnerability to an unseen enemy of the empire that is everywhere, and could be anywhere. The exceptionally well-documented, ruinous physiological impact of long-term stress be damned.

Fortunately, the passionately socialist Shaw cares little for the status-quo. The more we consider the socio-political context and content of the text, ably assisted by our sparse Brechtian staging, and continue to build on Act IV’s encapsulation of everything Freddy and Eliza have, made able to see their future through the medium of Shaw’s written sequel, the more apparent it is that their inverted power dynamic is a radical celebration of the possibilities of a socialist society governed by the not by stratified class, but by a spirit of shared humanity. Shaw’s writing recalls the sentiment of his early feminist forebear John Stuart Mill, who in 1869’s The Subjection of Women, remarks:

“the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.”

Perhaps most significantly, though, it is Simone de Beauvoir that can best offer a summation of Shaw’s seemingly prescient, impassioned socialist attack on the divisions of class with her powerful words in The Second Sex: “The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another”.

Further Reading:
Brecht, Bertolt. 1964. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Ed. and trans. John Willett. British edition. London: Methuen

Squiers, Anthony (2015). "A Critical Response to Heidi M. Silcox's "What's Wrong with Alienation?"". Philosophy and Literature.

Cole, Margaret (1961). The Story of Fabian Socialism. London: Heinemann

Shaw, Bernard (1884). A Manifesto (Fabian Tract No. 2). London: Grant Richards.

Pelling, Henry (1965). The Origins of the Labour Party. Oxford: Oxford University Press

https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/black-friday

https://titanicfacts.net/titanic-victims/

Tozer, Malcolm David William (1978). Manliness: the evolution of a Victorian ideal. lra.le.ac.uk (PhD thesis). University of Leicester

Manliness and morality: middle-class masculinity in Britain and America, 1800-1940. Mangan, J. A.,, Walvin, James,. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1987

Kingsley, Charles (1889). Letters and Memoirs of His Life, vol. II. Scribner's. p. 54. Quoted by Rosen, David (1994). "The volcano and the cathedral: muscular
Christianity and the origins of primal manliness". In Donald E. Hall (ed.) (ed.). Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age. Cambridge University Press

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/toxic-masculinity-definition-what-is-boys-men-gillette-ad-behaviour-attitude-girls-women-a8729336.html

https://projects.history.qmul.ac.uk/thehistorian/2017/05/12/man-up-the-victorian-origins-of-toxic-masculinity/

Cotton Minchin, J. G. (1901). Our Public Schools: Their Influence on English History; Charter House, Eton, Harrow, Merchant Taylors', Rugby, St. Paul's Westminster,

Winchester. Swan Sonnenschein & Co.

Rosenthal, Robert; Jacobson, Lenore, Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ intellectual Development, Crown House Publishing, 2003

E. M. Forster, On British Public School Boys

Shaw, George Bernard, Pygmalion Sequel

https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/stress-body

https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/a-to-z/s/stress

Mill, John Stuart (1869). The Subjection of Women (1869 first ed.). London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books 1989, c1952.

Pygmalion in Rehearsal, 3/5 – “King Enough For Me” – Part 3

At the height of its influence as recently as 1901, Muscular Christianity and Victorian Masculinity alike stressed that to be a “real man”, men must be physically strong and athletic, the pater familias, ruling over their homes with extensive power and keeping their wife and children under control. Middle-class men in particular were expected to be seen to work outside the home, and to be the breadwinners for their families, lest their masculine status be imperilled – woe betide the male writer, that would be forced to shut himself indoors away from the world to avoid the mockery and scorn of other men for taking up such a feminine pursuit within the domestic sphere of women. So too did men have to be consistent in their homosociality, and be careful to always be seen to associate with other men in gentlemen’s clubs and taverns, which would serve to keep them away from the feminine home as long as possible. Most strikingly, one author once observed of the poisonous philosophy: "If asked what our muscular Christianity has done, we point to the British Empire."

With Imperialism at the height of its cultural power and influence, the masculinity of Muscular Christianity emphasised that a man was courageous and enduring, a hunter, adventurer and hardy pioneer that was self-sufficient and independent, with a very broad education and knowledge. Not coincidentally, men like this made excellent military recruits during a time when the British Empire was deemed to be in danger during the Scramble for Africa. Indeed, it would seem that toxic masculinity itself makes for an excellent means of training soldiers for free from boyhood into manhood. No army needs go to any great effort or expense to recruit and train when society itself will do all the work of leading emotionally broken, dehumanised young men straight into recruitment offices in the name of patriotism and manliness. The young and impressionable oft become what it is they are told they are by those in authority –the technical term for this, in education theory, is The Pygmalion Effect.

Freddy's timid, socially clumsy reserve is far removed from the ideal of Victorian manhood.

In Shaw’s romance, though, despite very likely having grown up in an environment that would have stressed all of this in his (albeit sub-par) primary school years and his later unrefined socialite upbringing, Freddy Eysnford-Hill is emphatically none of those things. E.M. Forster once lamented that Victorian masculinity’s valorisation of the athlete as a boy’s-own hero had had a ruinous effect on their emotional development, noting that it had led to “well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds, and undeveloped hearts”, and most importantly to Shaw, his unsung hero Freddy, if he has nothing else, genuinely has a heart. He is a far cry from that Edwardian ideal of a strong, self-sufficient romantic hero figure, described by Shaw in the play’s prose sequel as not being strong in his constitution, and unable to cope with life’s emergencies. Unlike his contemporaries, Freddy does not work as a man is expected to, nor does he have the run of his home with Eliza, and throughout the play, his social associations are not with any other men, but with women – his mother, his sister, Mrs. Higgins, and his wife-to-be, with the written afterword suggesting that only Colonel Pickering has any sort of manly relationship with him, and even then as a kindly, avuncular financial benefactor in his marriage for Eliza’s sake.

Pygmalion in Rehearsal, 3/5 – “King Enough For Me” – Part 2

That the horrific, hateful violence against Suffragette women on 1910’s famed Black Friday was a mere two years before Shaw wrote such an overtly feminist play, or that the sinking of the Titanic occurred in April 1912, in the midst of his playwriting – a disaster in which the literal segregation of social classes caused 76% of Third Class passengers including 49 children from Steerage to perish compared to only 49% of First Class passengers including 1 First Class child, surely cannot have gone unnoticed, nor been uninfluential, however slightly, in forming some element of the play’s bellowing cry for socialism and classless society.

Amongst the most compelling examples of Shaw’s progressive thought in the play comes towards the end of Act IV, before the blisteringly feminist tour-de-force of Act V (but that’s a story for another blog). Shaw’s tale finds Eliza, at last sick to the back teeth, and fled out onto the streets from the blinkered tyranny of Higgins, catching Freddy Eysnford-Hill in the act of lovelorn loitering outside her home, having madly loved her from afar since the opening moments of Act I. Within moments, Freddy betrays his feelings, and with Eliza realising she feels the same way, the two are caught up in an endearingly comical spectacle of avoiding the watchful eyes of a patrolling police officer whilst completely unable to keep their hands off of each other.

Left: Freddy Eysnford-Hill loiters outside Eliza's home, stalked by a Bobby on the beat.

As we blocked the scene, we became more and more keenly aware that for all of the scene’s comedy, Shaw masterfully underscores the couple’s conference with a genuine dramatic tension and an emotional resonance. One need not reminisce about the all-too-recent Black Friday of the Suffragettes to know that no police officer would be too kind, to say the least, to any woman thought to be stirring up trouble on the streets, certainly not one caught in flagrante delicto in the dead of night with a middle-class young man in Edwardian England. Eliza herself, with her panicked cries of “They’ll take away my character and drive me onto the streets for speaking to gentlemen!” to Higgins’ suspected plain clothes officer in Act I, alludes to the reality of Edwardian women living in fear of the police, and of the ruination wrought by any accusations of public indecency levelled at them in a deeply sexist society.

The two are caught multiple times, and yet, Freddy nobly leaps to Eliza’s defence and gives her a perfect alibi that the two are engaged so that before either of them knows it, they are away in a taxi making plans to be married, and for Eliza to forever escape Higgins’ vile clutches and find safety with Freddy. His own male presence in Eliza’s life is consistently a stark contrast with Higgins, countering the master phonetics professor’s cold, sneering, cruel and abusive treatment with a sincere, heartfelt love and affection for Eliza precisely as he first saw her, which endures long after Higgins has twisted her into something she is not.

"I spend most of my nights here. It's the only place where I'm happy."

Most interestingly, Shaw calls Pygmalion A Romance in Five Acts, and yet Freddy’s character, and the relationship he and Eliza share, is a significant departure from the socio-cultural ideal of Edwardian masculinity that typically informs such contemporary romantic tales – Edwardian Masculinity itself still strongly resembling, as it did, the ideals of Victorian masculinity and its associated movement for Muscular Christianity that followed a cultural shift in the collective notion of manliness from spirituality and earnestness between 1837 and 1870, towards one of strength, stoicism, and emotional suppression which laid the foundations of what we now recognise as the culture of toxic masculinity that is killing men in staggeringly high numbers today.

Continued in Part 3

Pygmalion in Rehearsal, 3/5 – “King Enough For Me” – Part 1

Fresh from his undoubtedly barnstorming Barbican debut sabbatical, Dickon Farmer, the production’s Professor Henry Higgins, triumphantly returned to rehearsals, where the play’s last acts were just beginning to come together in earnest. In their incipient, unformed state, our proceedings took on a distinctly Brechtian sparseness. Through the artifice of theatre, a few lines of scotch tape gave us our metaphysical stage, with discarded, yet-unassembled kitchen roll tubes promised as organ pipes for set dressing in the future. So, too, with many of us still on book, and deeper character work still undone, was there a sense that identification and sympathy with the characters and action was significantly lower on the agenda than simply getting the words down – so that, fittingly enough, things were not yet familiar or obvious but instead stripped of their self-evident quality, reduced to an ephemeral representation of reality removed from reality itself, complete with nearly all the other common Brechtian trappings: harsh, bright lights, interruptions, direct address to the audience, and (just occasionally!) reading stage directions out loud.

With all else removed, subject to this enforced, Brecht-like estrangement effect, there was little left to me in this would-be Epic Theatre space but self-reflection, a critical view of the action on the stage, and above all, still in my exploratory phase, a sense that the space itself was not meant for veritable performance, but as a forum for the play’s charged socio-political ideas, where – indeed, after the styles of Brecht’s theatrical forebears Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold – the focus was far from manipulating emotions or creating any complacency-breeding catharsis, but instead on exploring the truth of the work’s impassioned socio-political content, and the broader context of the society and culture which produced the author and his work.

From left: Kevin Furness' Mr. Doolittle, Production Stage Manager Kejenne Beard, Dickon Farmar's Henry Higgins, and Director Emilia Teglia

Politically awakened in 1882, at 26, by a talk from famed Progressive Era economist Henry George at a socialist meeting at Memorial Hall, playwright George Bernard Shaw was inspired to fervent socialist activism, thence joining the reformist Fabian Society in 1884 and writing Fabian Tract No.2, the society’s manifesto, before year’s end.

It read:

“The most striking result of our present system of farming out the national Land and capital to private individuals has been the division of society into hostile classes, with large appetites and no dinners at one extreme, and large dinners and no appetites at the other”

Playwright George Bernard Shaw in 1914

Even here, long before Pygmalion’s 1912 completion and 1913 theatre debut, the young Shaw quickly proved himself a committed democratic socialist with an abiding disdain for the needless human suffering wrought by the stratified divisions of class. The play, today renowned as his magnum opus, is the culmination of a rich and varied lifetime of socialist thought and political action (including a stint in politics, which saw him attend the conference which birthed Keir Hardie’s Independent Labour Party and laid the democratic socialist foundations for our modern Labour), building on his own lifelong literary history of satirising conventions of love and class with 1894’s Arms and The Man, his first popular play, and shot through with righteously furious feminist oratory and an unflinching demand for a classless society.

Indeed, seemingly every word of Shaw’s dramedy retelling of myth is devoted to ceaselessly attacking the Greek figure of Pygmalion, reborn as Henry Higgins, the very incarnation and product of the worst excesses of upper-class mollycoddling, as a hideous, snobbish, misogynistic man-child utterly removed from anything resembling real life or meaningful human interaction with any human woman except his own exhausted and frustrated mother.

"Pygmalion and Galatea" by by Louis Gauffier (1761-1801).

Continued in Part 2.

Review: Gainsborough’s Girls by Cecil Beaton

Directed by David Taylor at the Tower Theatre, Stoke Newington, May 9th 2019

Christopher O’Dea-Giordano

Disclosure: I have been a performing member of the Tower Theatre since 2016, and am associated with some of those cast in the play.

First produced at Brighton’s Theatre Royal for the Festival of Britain in 1951, self-proclaimed super-fan Cecil Beaton’s passion project on the life and times of the renowned 18th-century society portraitist Thomas Gainsborough has languished unperformed until now, with director David Taylor’s Tower Theatre production bringing the work to gloriously sartorial life.

Telling the story of the Gainsborough family’s move to London in 1774 for the great man to make his living producing fine portraits for high society, his seeming success is marred by a constant frustration that he is failing to be true to his artistic spirit, which longs to go back to painting the landscapes of his native Suffolk much to the chagrin of the others in his life, who insist it will never make his family any money. Meanwhile, his beautiful daughters each move to ingratiate themselves into the upper echelons of London society by marriage, with disastrous results for the whole family.

Photography by Robert Piwko, Courtesy of Tower Theatre

With Beaton’s writing zeroing in on the experience of the great man’s daughters in the course of events, Gainsborough, fittingly enough, finds himself made a background subject in a landscape portrait of high society London; a grim and melancholy tableau of bourgeois brinkmanship, bitter sibling rivalry, duplicity, love, betrayal, and maddening heartbreak, with Gainsborough’s own fearsome tussles over artistic integrity with his harried agent forming an artful undercurrent of tension on the fundamental question of how best to make one’s living and remain true to oneself in spirit in the face of a hostile and uncaring society, whether as an ambitious artist, or indeed, a pair of ambitious, eligible young ladies.

By far the production’s biggest highlight is Kathleen Morrison and Sue Carling’s breath-taking costume design replete with wigs by Doris Designs and hair and accessories by Mark-Louis Anderson-Fisher and Nikki Diggins, with every member of the capable and talented cast adorned in sumptuous Georgian gowns and waistcoats that must be seen to be truly appreciated, making Taylor’s production an impeccably well-dressed treat for the sartorially-minded theatregoer. Giving the beautiful tailoring on display its finer detail is Peter Foster’s ingeniously minimalist set, ably accompanied by Stephen Ley and Alan Wilkinson’s capable, immersive sound and lighting work, making for an aesthetically bold and pleasingly confident production.

Photography by Robert Piwko, Courtesy of Tower Theatre

Though the oftentimes languid, introspective writing and Taylor’s accompanying slow-paced, meditative direction might make it something of an acquired taste akin to Ibsen-like realist drama or Chekov-ist modernism, for those drawn to theatre of its kind, the two-act play makes for a compelling and interesting tale full of fascinating characters and standout performances from a very capable cast - Simon Lee performs an authoritative lead as Tom Gainsborough, and Janet South cuts a sympathetic figure as his wife. The two Emilys, Deane and McCormick, are each their own commanding presence, imbuing daughters Margaret and Mary with distinct, clashing and compelling personalities, and McCormick in particular proving capable of creating genuinely intense and shocking moments. Anthony Rhodes ably compounds themes of divided loyalties and double lives in his turn as bachelor Lord Angus, with his stage mother Amanda Waggott adeptly performing a stiflingly snobbish Lady Codlington, whilst rounding out a fine cast is Matthew Ibbotson as the Gainsborough family’s endearingly loyal butler Luke, Jonathan Norris as Tom’s exasperated agent Alderman Bundy, and Joanna Coulton in an amusing comic turn as working girl Dolly.

All in all, a gorgeously presented, well performed, worthwhile production with compelling drama and comedy aplenty. Doubtless, die-hard fans of Georgian fashion will be pleased.

Photography by Robert Piwko, Courtesy of Tower Theatre