{"id":1581,"date":"2018-04-02T09:11:41","date_gmt":"2018-04-02T08:11:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/?p=1581"},"modified":"2018-04-04T06:44:08","modified_gmt":"2018-04-04T05:44:08","slug":"propwatch-the-book-in-the-inheritance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2018\/04\/propwatch-the-book-in-the-inheritance.html","title":{"rendered":"Propwatch: the book in The Inheritance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A companionable slump of young men sits on the floor and frown over notebooks and laptops. They squirm to tell their story, but they\u2019re struggling. One clutches a cherished volume \u2013 Howards End<\/em> by EM Forster. Speaking in the third person, he announces, \u2018he opens his favourite novel, hoping to find inspiration in its first familiar sentence.\u2019 That sentence, which we\u2019ll hear more than once in The Inheritance: \u2018One may as well begin with Helen\u2019s letters to her sister.\u2019<\/p>\n

It\u2019s updated early in Matthew Lopez\u2019s searching, rapturously involving two-part epic The Inheritance<\/em><\/a>, which resettles Forster\u2019s narrative in present-day gay New York. A selfish, damaged young writer called Toby leaves sozzled voicemails for his lover, Eric. The lovers succeed Forster\u2019s liberal Schlegel sisters, whose efforts to make meaning involve the well-defended wealthy, the aspirant poor, death and renewal. Eric and Toby too, during the play\u2019s seven hours, are enmeshed in love and lovelessness, in an unwitting bequest of a totemic house they make their own way towards. Same story, different world.<\/p>\n

It feels important that we don\u2019t just intuit the book behind the play we\u2019re watching. In Stephen Daldy\u2019s spare, resolute production, we actually see it \u2013 from where I sat, it seemed a pale blue hardback, perhaps the elegant Hodder edition<\/a>. There\u2019s a lot going on in the play that follows \u2013 the conflicted legacy of the Aids crisis, the ways in which unloved gay men can find ways to love and be loved, the search for a place and emotion that feels like home. Howards End<\/em> walks beside it, holding out a hand from the past.<\/p>\n

Read the past to find a present<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Jews are historically the people of the book, but the gays aren\u2019t far behind. The Inheritance<\/em> charts the way queer people read their way into identity. You read the past to find a present you can live with, a person you can become. Milestone novels aren\u2019t just fictions, they\u2019re maps \u2013 pointing to paths along which your own liveable identity might emerge. Two questing young men (both played by Samuel H Levine, preening or abashed as necessary) hit the Strand Bookstore looking for the great and gay. Baldwin, Cavafy, Hollinghurst. Call Me By Your Name<\/em>, obvs. And tweedy, timid Edward Morgan Forster: not just his gay-themed Maurice<\/em> but Howards End<\/em>, even though it pivots around women\u2019s choices in straight relationships.<\/p>\n

Lopez finds a play through Howards End<\/em>, and his characters find themselves through Forster. Morgan himself (a brilliantly impulsive and prissy Paul Hilton) is the animating spirit of the first play, standing admiringly, admonishingly in his charcoal suit among these enviably slouchy, barefoot modern men.<\/p>\n

The book does a lot of work here. It\u2019s a great enabler for Lopez. He doesn\u2019t have to justify his unusually polished, literary register (\u2018As a kid, I used to think America was shaped like an animal, charging in an easterly direction toward the sunrise\u2019). Novelistic conventions \u2013 a will consigned to flames, a polite marriage of convenience, the eruption of a hooker at a society wedding \u2013 pique the story (and provoke gratifyingly audible responses in the audience). Forster pulls characters into usefully coincidental encounters or catalytic courses of action. Without him to tug the threads, a play built around the fitful bonds of modern city life might barely make it through the first hour, let alone into the seventh.<\/p>\n

As the play develops, Eric stands at the centre of the connections. He\u2019s sublimely played by Kyle Soller, often a firecracker actor who here damps down the confidence, dials up the kindness, stands blinking under a trollish scrunch of hair as he works out what to do. Forster\u2019s plots test unassuming decency and trip up his characters\u2019 settled identities. The Inheritance<\/em> in some ways occupies a more slender social palate \u2013 almost all male, almost all white, almost all middle class. It revists America\u2019s plague years, but the crises it faces are less stark. Yet Soller\u2019s Eric holds tight to kindness, has to grow, makes his choices matter.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The opening scene of The Inheritance – photo by Simon Annand. Top photo: Paul Hilton by Tristram Kenton\/The Guardian<\/p><\/div>\n

At the time he wrote Howards End<\/em>, Forster hadn\u2019t had sex. He admits as much here: his only appearance in the second part recounts with rue and rapture his sexual awakening \u2013 a casual buttocky caress that travelled up his spine and into his psyche with an electric crackle. If he did act on the revelation physically, he didn\u2019t publicly \u2013 Maurice<\/em> remained under wraps until after the author\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

Making maps<\/strong><\/p>\n

Productions based on novels often seem longer and talkier than strictly necessary, but Lopez doesn\u2019t apologise for his play\u2019s length. Following Forster lets him delay to repay. He makes a virtue of discursive disputes over brunch, of anecdotes (about a house, a bathhouse, a house again) that unobtrusively swell into troubled arias. He daringly delays understanding for Toby\u2019s monstrous behaviour until deep into the second play. However neat and rosy his sense of an ending, he lets us invest in the characters his narrative eventually blesses.<\/p>\n

Shared narration has rippled through stage adaptations of novels since the RSC\u2019s Nicholas Nickleby<\/em> and the early work of Shared Experience. Here it doesn\u2019t narrate the characters so much as offer them options, sifting choices that will shape them. For much of the play, the cast sits around Bob Crowley\u2019s platform stage like diners at a Japanese table (the discussions about how to live a decent life have a Symposium<\/em>-style mealtime formality). They chip in lines, they listen intently (Luke Thallon engages so exquisitely, it’s almost upsetting). The problem for rootless men isn\u2019t so much the anxiety of influence as the sense of being born into bereavement. Previous queer generations were silenced by secrecy, or illness. Where are the markers mapping out the road they came in on? Holding high a novel that frets over Edwardian mores won\u2019t liberate them, exactly, but can remind them that others have faced the struggle to live with integrity in a culture that doesn\u2019t quite fit.<\/p>\n

Follow David on Twitter: @mrdavidjays<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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