Plague Over England

Poor old Sir John Gielgud, who died in 2000, would be horrified and deeply upset that a play about his prosecution for cottaging while tipsy in a London lavatory in 1953 – the year of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation – was being presented in the West End, even if it is the first play by a critic seen there since Kenneth More starred in Jeremy Kingston’s Signs of the Times many watery moons ago.

Gielgud’s slip-up was as unsavoury an episode as the escapades of someone like George Michael more recently, and the kind of thing Nicholas de Jongh’s own newspaper, the Evening Standard, delights in exposing while tut-tutting in the corner. But de Jongh places the incident in the context of 1950s homophobia, articulated as part of a “moral threat” in a rising tide of fornication, adultery and drunkenness.

Despite briefly lingering on the ludicrous political and even medical campaign to stamp out homosexuality, he weakens the sinews of a not very strong story by creating a propagandist catch-all scenario of male bonding that would not have looked out of place in a Gay Sweatshop season at Ed Berman’s Almost Free Theatre thirty-five years ago. One of the “pretty police” who tracked Gielgud in the lavatorial lair is seen in cahoots with a young student, while an American doctor pursues a repressed novice.

Tamara Harvey’s production looked over-stuffed and enjoyably vivacious in the tiny Finborough last year, but seems bitty and unfocused on the Duchess stage, deficient in dramatic texture, smacking of a television script. The skittish, willowy Gielgud of Jasper Britton has been succeeded by the equally brilliant, very different Sir John of Michael Feast, an outrageously underrated actor who was Ariel to Gielgud’s fourth Prospero at the Old Vic and one of the henchmen to his Audenesque Spooner in Pinter’s No Man’s Land on the same stage.

His killingly exact observation – the very tilt of his head, the mellifluent voice, the sly twinkle – compensates for his over-shortness of stature, while Celia Imrie - ditch the wig, love - plays a nice double of a no-nonsense Sybil Thorndike and a blowzy hostess in the gay drinking club without the edge or bite Nichola McAuliffe managed last year.

There is a splendid array of harrumphing and hypocritical grandees played by Hugh Ross, Simon Dutton and John Warnaby, though Dutton’s Binkie Beaumont and Warnaby’s obsequious old theatre critic, sacked for snoring through Endgame, simultaneously hit the target and strain credulity.

As a slice of social history, with quaint one-liners (“There are fairies at the bottoms of my guardsmen”; “Sex, sex, sex, I’m not having it” – a misquote of a Ray Cooney line), and a few purblind digs at musical theatre, the play has value, and plenty of nudge-nudge in-jokes, but as a portrait of an actor, or even a study in the psychopathology of casual same-sex sex, it begs more questions than it answers.

- Michael Coveney

NOTE: The following THREE STAR review dates from 3 March 2008, when this production premiered at the Finborough Theatre.

John Gielgud was arrested by an under-cover policeman while loitering with gay intent in a lavatory in 1953, and the surrounding furore is the spring for Evening Standard critic Nicholas de Jongh’s first stage play. Plague Over England is a title with poignant echoes of both a 1937 patriotic Elizabethan movie, Fire Over England, which caught a mood of paranoia over imminent invasion; and of the AIDs catastrophe in the homosexual community of the 1980s.

The most striking feature of de Jongh’s play – which, for all its imperfections, is never less than highly enjoyable – is the healthily sardonic outrage with which he treats the idea that homosexuality is a disease that might have been treated by aversion electro-therapy, overruled by law or even simply grown out of.

The consensual nature of most casual homosexual relationships was beyond general comprehension and public morality. Why de Jongh’s play matters is that, to some extent, it still is. Gielgud was part of an underground activity in public lavatories, gay clubs and, of course, discreet theatrical circles, which is vividly evoked in the play. His exposure in the Evening Standard (“a ghastly little gossip sheet”, a line much enjoyed by the current editor, Veronica Wadley, on opening night), after pleading guilty to a vice charge and being fined £100, led to fears of disgrace and professional disaster.

But Gielgud, who was rehearsing NC Hunter’s “Chekhovian” A Day by the Sea – in which he played a bachelor son of the non-marrying kind – braved first the insulting equivocation of his all-powerful producer Binkie Beaumont (a notoriously vicious homosexual himself), and secondly the possible cold shoulder of his audience; but his entrance in first Liverpool and then at the Haymarket in London was roundly cheered.

De Jongh tells the story admirably and crams in almost too much around it. Gielgud’s undercover nemesis, PC Terry Fordham (Leon Ockenden), pursues his own gay relationship with the student Greg (Robin Whiting), son of an establishment pillar. Another couple operating in this climate of fear fuelled by “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” are an American doctor (Steve Hansell) and a repressed gay novice (Timothy Watson).

The play is carried by Jasper Britton’s superb Gielgud, nervous, funny and sleek, buoyed along by Nichola McAuliffe’s brilliant double of a steadfast, sepulchral Sybil Thorndike and a garish hostess in the Queen Mab club, a setting straight out of Rodney Ackland’s Absolute Hell.

There are powerful, well crafted passages featuring Simon Dutton and John Warnaby as intolerant grandees and father figures (Warnaby also plays Chiltern Moncrieffe, Gielgud’s confidant, an old-style critic with elements, perhaps, of James Agate and Cuthbert Worsley), but many of the scenes in Tamara Harvey’s generously indulgent production are either bitty, or meandering, or both. Many lines hit home, some don’t.

Suddenly we jump to 1975, with Mrs Thatcher newly elected as Conservative leader and Gielgud rehearsing Pinter’s No Man’s Land in which, I recall, the first big laugh came on “Do you often hang around Hampstead Heath?” and Gielgud made himself up to resemble WH Auden. Gay activists are marching outside while Gielgud makes an unlikely but dramatically neat reconciliation with his young prosecutor. Britton’s great actor remains aloof, vulnerable and slightly absurd to the end, a lovely study in lip-trembling deference and secret skittishness; God saved our noblest queen - and the public rejoiced, eventually.

- Michael Coveney