The presence of Felicity Kendal is a determining factor in this new version of EM Forster’s 1908 novel. Kendal is a beloved actor who rightly brings in the punters. But by casting her as Charlotte Bartlett, who accompanies Forster’s heroine on her life-changing visit to Italy, the production diverts attention from Lucy’s emotional education and makes the chaperone the star.
To be fair, Simon Reade does a skilled job in filleting Forster’s cunningly organised novel. In the first half, we see Lucy and Charlotte in Florence. Seeking experience of life, Lucy paradoxically witnesses a murder and finds herself impulsively kissed by a fellow tourist, George Emerson, on a violet-covered hillside in Fiesole.
Back home in Surrey, Lucy gets engaged to a supercilious aesthete, Cecil Vyse, who treats her as a potentially interesting trophy. But the turning point comes when George and his father move into a neighbouring villa and Lucy finds herself torn between conflicting values.
Reade, who brought out the theatricality in a highly popular Pride and Prejudice, is not deaf to Forster’s ideas: his feminism, his anti-clerical humanism, his belief in freedom and truth. But no adaptation can convey the silken irony that runs through the book or Forster’s running commentary on Lucy’s inner tumult. Her capacity for life is reflected in the way she emphasises the triumph rather than the despair when she plays a Beethoven sonata. Against that, when Lucy angrily rebuffs the persistent George, Forster tells us “she joined the vast armies of the benighted who follow neither the heart nor the brain and march to their destiny by catchwords”. You don’t get that in this version.
Lauren Coe does a perfectly decent job of conveying the heroine’s gradual maturation, but you feel this production doesn’t so much love Lucy as Charlotte. Kendal catches with great accuracy Charlotte’s strange mix of outward propriety and inner regret over her own wasted life: it is amusing to see her freezing with horror when accosted by the Emersons over a pensione dinner table, but there is also a hint of raffishness in the glee with which she attaches herself to a mannish lady novelist. Kendal is always a pleasure to watch. But by insistently counterpointing Charlotte’s missed opportunities with Lucy’s need for courage, this version elevates a secondary character into the prime attraction.
On a technical level, Adrian Noble’s production is highly proficient. Paul Wills’s design embodies the symbolic contrast between socially restrictive rooms and views that represent naturalness and freedom: indeed the high point of the evening comes when the respectable Honeychurches stumble upon a frisky, all-male nude bathing party. There is also strong support all round. Charlie Anson as Cecil hints at the belated gallantry beneath his Wildean exterior, and Tom Morley has the right moody melancholy as George. Elsewhere Jeff Rawle as his rationalist father, Simon Jones as a booming cleric and Joanne Pearce as the waistcoated novelist all offer sharp contributions.
The production is fine as far as it goes. But if you really want to understand Lucy’s inner turmoil and the crucial Forsterian battle between love and middle-class inhibition, you have to go back to the book.
- At Theatre Royal, Bath, until 8 October. Box office: 01225 448844. Then touring.
