The boys from London's Bush theatre recently advocated a ban on the classics. In fact, we need to profit from the past, as Joan Littlewood realised when she told the rawly talented Shelagh Delaney to "read Ibsen". And I can think of a few dramatists who might learn how to harmonise plot and character from studying Somerset Maugham's The Circle, immaculately revived by Mark Rosenblatt in a joint production from Oxford Stage Company and Salisbury Playhouse.
The danger is that this kind of play, written in 1919, elicits a stock response. It boasts French windows, a stately drawing room, Georgian furniture: all the things young dramatists have fought against. Study the play closely, however, and you see that Maugham is offering a waspish portrait of upper-class manners.
The hero, Arnold Champion-Cheney, is a priggish MP whose mother abandoned him when he was five to run off with a rising politician. Now the fugitive Lady Kitty returns with her old lover. A comically ridiculous pair, she turns out to be a berouged scatterbrain and he a ratty exile forever cursing his lost opportunities. The question Maugham poses is whether history will repeat itself when Arnold's wife threatens to abscond with an impecunious rubber planter.
Seeing the play soon after Barrie's Dear Brutus prompts some fascinating comparisons. Barrie is always dubbed a sentimentalist, Maugham a cynic. Yet both playwrights argue that character is more important than destiny. At the end of The Circle, Lady Kitty's old lover forcefully says that their young counterparts may succeed where they failed because their personalities are different. It gives a tart comedy a romantic ambivalence; it also suggests that both Maugham and Barrie, shadowed by the first world war, were mounting pleas for individual temperament at a time when fate seemed cruelly implacable.
Classic plays, in short, are revealing social documents. Maugham's is also structured with impeccable logic and far subtler than it at first seems, a point grasped by Rosenblatt's fantastically bright production. Characters are played from their own point of view rather than other people's. Dale Rapley makes the deceived MP not just a stuffed shirt but a man suffering a lifelong emotional wound, as shown by his heartrending cry of, "We've had enough divorces in our family." Jonathan Newth as his cuckolded father also implies that his own cynical irony is a defence against further hurt. And, even if Lois Baxter is a bit too youthfully vivacious as the raddled Lady Kitty, Trevor Baxter is hilarious as her harrumphing, ill-tempered partner. It's an excellent evening that not only makes the case for Maugham, but also proves that, far from banning the classics, we should overcome our prejudices and widen the area of choice.
Until October 21. Box office: 01722 320333. Then touring to Exeter, Warwick, Barnstaple, Bury St Edmunds and Windsor.
