About Last Night

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review an important off-Broadway revival of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. Here’s an excerpt.

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Shelagh Delaney wrote her first play, “A Taste of Honey,” a snapshot of life in working-class England, in 1958, when she was just 18 years old. Amazingly, it had successful runs in the West End in 1959 and on Broadway the following year, was turned into a hit movie (which has just been reissued on home video by the Criterion Collection) in 1961 and was revived no less successfully on Broadway in 1981. That, alas, was the end of Delaney, who died in 2011 without writing anything else that did remotely as well. It was as if she’d made a deal with the devil: You get to hit the jackpot the first time you pull the lever, but never again.

“A Taste of Honey” continues to be staged with fair regularity in England, but it’s rarely seen in America anymore, though I reviewed a very fine production by Chicago’s Shattered Globe Theater in 2008. The Pearl Theatre Company’s new revival is the first time that it has been performed in New York since 1981. That surprises me, for it is a marvelous piece of work, at once devastatingly blunt and uncommonly poignant. No matter: Austin Pendleton, the director, and his five-person cast have done right by Delaney’s play, and now that the news is full of the hopes and fears of America’s own working class, it couldn’t be more timely.

“A Taste of Honey” is the story of Jo (Rebekah Brockman), a 17-year-old girl-woman from Manchester who lives with Helen (Rachel Botchan), her sluttish, self-dramatizing mother, in a dingy flat with “a lovely view of the gasworks.” Jo has longings far beyond her station, but she is knocked off the track when she falls in love with and is impregnated by a black sailor (Ade Otukoya) who ships out without knowing that he‘s going to be a father. Unwilling to live with Helen and her latest lover (Bradford Cover) and determined to bear her child instead of aborting it, Jo invites her only friend, a homeless gay art student named Geof (John Evans Reese), to move in with her.

That’s pretty much all there is to “A Taste of Honey,” which ends inconclusively, albeit purposefully so. Bright and talented but devoid of prospects, Jo has learned too young that (in her own stoic words) “we don’t ask for life, we have it thrust upon us.” What, then, will she make of hers?…

For the record, Joan Plowright and Amanda Plummer played Jo on Broadway, Rita Tushingham starred in the film version and Helen Sadler was heart-tuggingly good in the 2008 Chicago revival. Hence it’s high praise to say that Ms. Brockman is worthy of her predecessors, giving an earthy performance that feels less like acting than living….

Mr. Pendleton has given “A Taste of Honey” a staging that serves the play with scrupulous, self-effacing care….

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Read the whole thing here.

An excerpt from Tony Richardson’s 1961 film version of A Taste of Honey, starring Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin:

A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green, a 1979 TV version of the 1977 revival of their two-person 1958 Broadway revue. Paul Trueblood is the pianist:

originally telecast in 1979:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“‘I never know why self-sacrifice is noble,’ said Miss Burke. ‘Why is it better to sacrifice oneself than someone else?’

“‘It is no better,’ said Hester, ‘and it is not really held to be.’”

Ivy Compton-Burnett, Mother and Son

Mrs. T and I just watched Conquest, a delicious 1937 movie in which Charles Boyer and Greta Garbo played Napoleon Bonaparte and the Countess Marie Walewska. Seeing Conquest reminded me that I reviewed two books about Napoleon—the only time I’ve ever had occasion to write about him—for the now-defunct Book Magazine in 2002. None of the dozen-odd pieces I wrote for Book has ever been reprinted, so I thought I’d post this one, which I like very much.

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One of the persistent legends of the publishing business is that you can always make a fast buck by bringing out a new biography of Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln—or Napoleon Bonaparte. That may have been true a half-century ago, but what about now? Granted, Napoleon is one of the few nineteenth-century European rulers about whom ordinary Americans know anything at all. Most of us vaguely recall that he was short (five foot five) and had a wife named Josephine (or was she his mistress?), and a smaller number are probably aware that he fought a battle at a place called Waterloo (but where was it?). But that’s about it, really, a handful of Trivial Pursuit questions with which to sum up the crowded life of the violent titan who shut down the French Revolution, crowned himself Emperor of France, fought a long string of battles that brought him within arm’s length of controlling all of Europe, overreached himself by vainly trying to conquer Russia, and ended his days in impotent exile on the tiny island of St. Helena, wondering to the last how it all went so terribly wrong.

For those seeking to fill in the blanks, Paul Johnson, the opinionated author of such supremely readable works of popular history as Modern Times and A History of the American People, has contributed a study of Napoleon to the Penguin Lives series of short biographies. The premise of these tasty little volumes is that it ought to be possible to sum up the life of a famous person in 200 pages or less. Seeing as how Johnson specializes in really, really long books, I wondered at first whether he was the best choice for the job, but within a few pages I knew that Napoleon is a near-perfect model of what a brief life can and should be: crisp, clear, concise and strongly personal.

In order to write a good short biography, you have to start with an unambiguous point of view. Nobody has ever accused Paul Johnson of being equivocal, and Napoleon leaves no possible doubt of his low opinion of the most famous general in history. As a good old-fashioned France-hating Catholic conservative, it stands to reason that Johnson would disapprove of the man who turned Europe inside out in his mad quest for power, but his book is more than just an attack on Napoleon himself: it is also a cautionary tale. For Johnson, Napoleon’s greatest significance is his influence on the dictators who came after him. “The totalitarian state of the twentieth century,” he writes, “was the ultimate progeny of the Napoleonic reality and myth….the great evils of Bonapartism—the deification of force and war, the all-powerful centralized state, the use of cultural propaganda to apotheosize the autocrat, the marshaling of entire peoples in the pursuit of personal and ideological power—came to hateful maturity only in the twentieth century, which will go down in history as the Age of Infamy.” That is the story he tells in Napoleon, and he tells it with the venomous simplicity of an obituary writer who has been waiting patiently to get the last word.

Once you’ve finished NapoleonNapoleon: A Biography, which he sniffishly dismisses in his bibliography as “pro-Napoleon,” though I can’t see why. Originally published in England five years ago, McLynn’s book is for the most part as harshly critical of its subject as Johnson’s: in it, he portrays Napoleon as “a secretive, unscrupulous, duplicitous and chillingly ambitious personality….He viewed human beings as despicable creatures, fuelled by banality and led by clichés.” If that’s pro-Napoleon, I shudder to think what McLynn would write about somebody he didn’t like.

For my part, I found Napoleon: A Biography to be both solidly written and seemingly balanced. A professional biographer and part-time academic, McLynn devotes rather too much space to amateur psychoanalysis (I can’t remember the last time I read a book that quoted Wilhelm Reich with a straight face). Fortunately, it’s easy enough to skip over the bits about mother complexes and stick to the good stuff, of which there is plenty, including a generous helping of characteristically brutal quotations from the man himself: “If the people refuse what makes for their own welfare they are guilty of anarchism and the first duty for the prince is to punish them.”

Napoleon on the battlefield, Napoleon in the bedroom, Napoleon in spectacular triumph and shameful defeat—McLynn shows us all the countless Napoleons in all their inexplicable inconsistency, though neither he nor Johnson comes close to supplying a definitive answer to the impossible question with which everyone who writes about Napoleon Bonaparte must eventually grapple. How could a misanthropic, sexually uncertain boy from Corsica have contrived to become the most powerful man in Europe by the age of 35? What was the source of his evil genius? The only possible answer was given by Androche Junot, his chief aide: “He is the sort of man of whom Nature is sparing and who only appears on earth at intervals of centuries.” To which the only possible reply is: Thank God they don’t come along any more often than that.

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A scene from Conquest:

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• An American in Paris (musical, G, too complex for small children, closes Jan. 1, reviewed here)
• The Color Purple (musical, PG-13, many performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, closes Jan. 1, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• A Day by the Sea (drama, G, not suitable for children, closes Oct. 23, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Fiorello! (musical, G, off-Broadway transfer of 2016 regional revival, closes Oct. 7, original production reviewed here)
• Sense & Sensibility (serious romantic comedy, G, remounting of 2014 off-Broadway production, closes Nov. 20, original production reviewed here)

IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:
• Sense & Sensibility (serious romantic comedy, G, remounting of 2014 off-Broadway production, closes Oct. 30, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN TYSON, VA.:
• Lobby Hero (drama, PG-13, extended through Oct. 16, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Fiorello! (musical, G, off-Broadway transfer of 2016 regional revival, closes Oct. 7, original production reviewed here)

“It is no good to think that other people are out to serve our interests.”

Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elders and Betters

Chuck Berry sings and plays “Maybelline” in an undated, unidentified telecast:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“People don’t resent having nothing nearly as much as too little.”

Ivy Compton-Burnett, A Family and a Fortune

My “Sightings” column for this week’s Wall Street Journal, which appeared on the paper’s website over the weekend, took note of the death on Friday of Edward Albee. It is running in today’s print editions. Here’s an excerpt.

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Edward Albee, who died on Friday at the age of 88, wrote one of the half-dozen greatest American plays of the 20th century—and one of the half-dozen worst American plays of the past decade. In truth, far more of his 30-odd plays were bad than good. Most of the fulsome tributes to the author of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” that have been posted, printed and tweeted since his death overlook this latter fact. Few of them, however, failed to mention that he couldn’t get a decent review between 1975 and 1994, when the off-Broadway production of “Three Tall Women” restored him to critical favor. If you didn’t know better, you might well suppose that the critics, not Mr. Albee himself, were mainly to blame for his long eclipse.

It’s easy to see why Mr. Albee metamorphosed from the bad boy of American theater into its grand old man. Not only did he live a long and productive life, but he was endlessly quotable and never hesitated to speak his mind, usually to hair-raising effect. But now that he is gone, it is his work, not his famously sharp tongue, for which he will be remembered—or not. “I have been overpraised and underpraised,” he said in 1982. “I assume by the time I finish writing—and I plan to go on writing until I’m 90 or gaga—it will all equal itself out.” But it hasn’t, not yet, and we are nowhere near sorting out his legacy. Was Albee a great playwright, or did he merely happen to write one great play?

The greatness of “Virginia Woolf” certainly wasn’t evident to everyone at the time of its premiere. Robert Coleman of the New York Daily Mirror went so far as to call it “a sick play for sick people.” A fair number of other critics were equally disgusted by its snarling sexual frankness, as well as by Mr. Albee’s determination to stick a knife in the chest of what he took to be the complacent optimism of mid-century America. Like “The Rite of Spring” before it, “Virginia Woolf” was more a succès de scandale than an instantaneously clear-cut artistic triumph…

Three Broadway revivals and hundreds of regional stagings later, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” is now universally regarded as a modern classic. But to this day, it remains the only one of Albee’s plays to have made a lasting impression on the general public, enough so that it was even spoofed on “The Simpsons.” And while “Three Tall Women,” “The Zoo Story” (1958), and “The Goat, or, Who Is Sylvia?” (2002) are also justly admired by critics and theatergoers and continue to be performed throughout America and the world, it would be an understatement to say that no such consensus exists as to the merits of the rest of his output….

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Read the whole thing here.

An excerpt from Steppenwolf Theater Company’s 2011 Chicago revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which transferred to the Arena Stage of Washington, D.C., and was produced on Broadway in 2012. It was directed by Pam MacKinnon and starred Carrie Coon, Madison Dirks, Tracy Letts, and Amy Morton:

From 2006:

As I was soaring through the skies of Pennsylvania the other day, my iPod served up Leopold Stokowski’s 1937 recording of Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (not currently available on CD, alas). You may know it as the piece to which Mickey Mouse nearly drowned in Fantasia. No sooner did it start playing than I broke out in a broad grin. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice always does that to me–and did so long before I ever saw Fantasia. It’s one of the many pieces of music that has the mysterious power to make me happy….

Read the whole thing here.