Saskia Wickham and Aden Gillett play a husband-and-wife team navigating London’s class system in Blanche McIntyre’s “Accolade.”
A Nicola Seed in association with Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theater presentation of a play in two acts by Emlyn Williams. Directed by Blanche McIntyre.
Wll Trenting - Aden Gillett
Rona Trenting - Saskia Wickham
Albert - Alan Francis
Thane Lampeter - Patrick Brennan
Phyllis - Olivia Darnley
Harold - Simon Darwen
Ian Trenting - Patrick Osborne
Marion Tillyard - Emma Jerrold
Daker - Graham Seed
A sharp thriller pivoting on a celebrity being caught having sex with a 14-year-old girl… was it written last year? In the last decade? Neither. The most shocking thing about Emlyn Williams's fascinating "Accolade" is that it was first performed in 1950. And has never been seen since. Blanche McIntyre's suspense-filled, utterly authentic exhumation doesn't just vindicate the Finborough Theater's laudable ReDiscoveriesUK season, it's riveting viewing.
"You're a family man. That's when it's worth something." So says publisher Thane Lampeter (Patrick Brennan), understandably delighted that his bestselling novelist Will Trenting (unostentatious Aden Gillett) has just received a knighthood. And his family is indeed pleased. His naive son, Ian (Patrick Osborne), is more interested in books but his wife, Rona (Saskia Wickham), is rather taken with the idea of becoming Lady Trenting. Even Will himself admits to "a snob corner of me that's tickled pink."
Concerns about class are central to the play. Will has been leading a dangerous double life, quietly but regularly attending orgies above a working-class South London pub.
But with the arrival of blackmailing Daker (Graham Seed) on the morning that Will is due at Buckingham Palace to receive the honor, tension rockets as everything turns from a question of private morality to the potentially explosive business of public exposure for a crime he was unaware of committing.
A lesser play would have resolved everything one way or the other at that point, but Williams, author of "The Corn is Green," which was filmed with Bette Davies, takes things a stage further. He himself was a family man who with a hidden life -- in his case, a closeted gay man at a time when homosexuality was wholly illegal. Thus his extended examination of a man's secrets, the cover-ups and surrounding hypocrisy, comes with the zing of true experience.
Upcoming director McIntyre is alive to the play's every emotional nuance. She and designer James Cotterill audaciously reconfigure the tiny stage into an in-the-round space of the drawing-room in which everything happens. Cotterill carpets the room and lines the walls with wallpaper of book spines and places audience members on plush benches round the perimeter. This gives the actors and the play's world true solidity while subtly underlining the notion of prying eyes looking in.
McIntyre evokes the society that controls the characters' behavior by keeping a rein on emotional display. Despite the pain Will and Rona go through, almost nobody over-emotes. The result is deeply affecting, notably in the superbly underplayed scene where Will risks his relationship with his son by confessing to him. Gillett's calibration of the differing intensities of Will's shame is spellbinding.
Williams' handling of a woman who married a man she loved but whose proclivities she acknowledged is equally absorbing. What price has she paid for allowing his Hyde life to be kept separate from their comfortable Jekyll existence? Maintaining outward optimism while hinting at the pain that stoicism costs her, Saskia Wickham fleshes out a woman who could be too saintly.
Despite spot-on, unpatronizing performances from Simon Darwen and Olivia Darnley as good-timers Harold and Phyllis who may not be as innocent as they appear, the writing of the working-class characters - tonally similar to the caricatured station staff in David Lean's film "Brief Encounter" -- undeniably dates the play. But McIntyre's first-rate production ensures that its dilemmas remain timeless and gripping.
Sets and costumes, James Cotterill, lighting, Neill Brinkworth; sound, Edward Lewis; production stage manager, Jennie Quirke. Opened, review Feb. 3, 2011. Running time: 2 HOURS, 15 MIN.
Contact David Benedict at
benedictdavid@mac.com