This is a show unlike any other. Subtitled “A Family Album”, it is written, narrated and directed by Vanessa Redgrave, and is a mixture of private memoir and public portrait of the antifascist movements of the 1930s. Discursive and haphazardly structured, it is also fascinating to anyone with an interest in the Redgrave family or the politics of the period.
Much of the first part is taken up with the story of Muriel Gardiner, an American anti-Nazi activist who worked tirelessly to rescue Austrian socialists after the murder of the country’s chancellor, Dolfuss, in 1934. Gardiner’s story was controversially co-opted by Lillian Hellman in her book, Pentimento, which was the source of the film, Julia, in which Redgrave herself starred. But Gardiner also had an affair with Stephen Spender, which prompts a reading of his polemical poem, Vienna, and an account of the sexual ambivalence of many of the prominent socialists of the 1930s including Vanessa’s father, Michael. The show builds towards an extended climax in which Thomas Mann delivers a lecture in New York in 1938 fiercely denouncing the passive attitude of the western democracies, Britain most especially, towards Hitlerian fascism.
Watching the production is like going on a switchback ride through the 1930s, but it is held together by the presence of Vanessa Redgrave, who is like a benignly reminiscent aunt with passionate convictions. Even when seated at an upstage desk, she gazes with rapt intensity at the three actors who play multiple characters in this restless political kaleidoscope: Robert Boulter appears as Spender, Michael Redgrave and Vanessa’s naval uncle, Nicholas Kempson, who kept a journal recording Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia; Lucy Doyle, on her professional debut, is highly impressive as the public-spirited Gardiner, who is also allowed a private skittishness; Paul Hilton delivers Mann’s attack on appeasement with a lean and hungry ferocity.
While this may not be the tidiest of shows, it makes abundantly clear that this was a decade in which governmental failure was offset by the activism of dedicated socialists living under what Spender called “the shadow of war”.
• At the Ustinov Studio, Bath, until 3 August.
