March 27, 2006: Bennett, The Old Country
Trafalgar Studios. Revival of a play first performed at the Queen’s Theatre, London, on 7 September 1977. This production opened at the Yvonne Arnaud theatre, Guildford, 1 February 2006. Directed by Stephen Unwin.
Bennett’s star is high right now, thanks to the great success of his play The History Boys; a film of that play, Bennett’s program bio informs us, will be released shortly. That’s what seems to lie behind the revival of a 1970s play about a British spy living in exile in Russia who, it turns out in Act II, is to be exchanged for a Russian spy being held by the British. The exiled spy, Hilary, and his wife, the long-suffering Bron, are living a quiet life in the country, visited only by a young starry-eyed but now disillusioned Brit, Eric, who has married a young, quite insufferable prig of a Russian named — what else? — Olga (who turns out to be working for the Russian authorities and is in on, and perhaps even a low-level manager of, the spy switcheroo). Bennett disguises this framework as well as he can during Act I, but of necessity brings it into the foreground in Act II. There it becomes apparent that Hilary and Bron’s new visitors — Duff, lately the recipient of a knighthood, and Veronica, his fashion-statement wife — are not just on vacation in rural Russia but have come to lead him (and Bron) away and back to the “old country.” Duff did so desperately hope that he could persuade Hilary to decide to go back to England of his own volition, but it becomes apparent that Hilary cannot bear the thought. He is not-happy where he is, needs his numerous books (the set is piled high with them), listens to Elgar on LP’s, over the objection of Bron, who just hates Elgar, and Vaughn Williams too, and is anchored in the status quo. Hence the title of the play, ironic as it plainly is.
This scaffolding, more than a little adventitious, has been erected for the primary if not sole purpose of giving us a protracted study in the modes of irony, personified in the character of Hilary. A sophisticated, intelligent, but grossly opinionated man, Hilary is the heavy load shouldered by all who know him and even the one person, Bron, who loves him. Bennett manages to avoid sentimentalizing Hilary — there was little danger of that, given Bennett’s temperament as a dramatist — and he achieves the more remarkable feat of making us like him, in a curious kind of way. After all, we do relish the barbs that Hilary launches al fresco, and his extemporaneous diatribes are wonderful fun also. They serve to endear him, almost, to us, even though we begin to see things that Hilary, for all his intelligence, is blind to.
Mostly what he cannot see is the short-lived quality of his present circumstances, which he appears to consider a sort of cynosure, apparently naïve to the larger political realities of the time. He tells his story, beginning toward the end of Act I, as I recall, and continuing into Act II. It involves the