Trelawny of the Wells at the National Theatre – Review

“Trelawny of the ‘Wells’ ” is one of those scripts that everyone hates except the public, and the actors who get to play it. After a 30-year absence from London, Pinero’s epitaph for the old actor-laddies has turned up twice, just before Christmas in a patchy all-star West End revival sadly lacking much direction, and now in a vastly better John Caird production for the open Olivier stage of the National.

The mystery, though, is why he didn’t go for the musical; Caird at his best (“Les Misérables”)and his worst (“Children of Eden”) is a director who, like his old partner Trevor Nunn, knows a very great deal about how to give classical dignity to song-and-dance shows.

What we have, however, is the play and here as with the recent “Pygmalion” on this same stage, the National production seems to be straining toward something bigger and better, like a feature film or the full Broadway production. Indeed, the single most breathtaking moment is a scenic one, when the theatrical boardinghouse to which Rose Trelawny has returned after her unhappy sojourn in Cavendish Square is suddenly opened out to reveal the bare stage of a huge Victorian playhouse complete with wings and royal boxes.

Written in the 1890s but set back 30 years, the play mourns the passing of the old barnstormers (superlatively played here by Betty Marsdenand Michael Bryant: “I am required to play an old, ham actor” “Oh but dearest, will you be able to come close to it?”) while celebrating the arrival of Tom Robertson (thinly disguised here as Tom Wrench) and his “cup and saucer realism.” Yet by the time the play was first seen, that too was being thrown out of the green-room by the arrival of Shaw and even Ibsen, so Pinero is left with a kind of Garrick Club nostalgia trip onto which he has had to batch a conventional love story.

Everything therefore depends on the playing, and here Caird is superbly served: Helen McCrory, in the title role, perfectly captures Rose’s crossover from a lovelorn ingenue to wounded woman, while Steven Pacey, Kevin Williams and Adam Kotz brilliantly distinguish between the classic theatrical types who surround her into the boardinghouse and backstage.

But the performance of the evening, indeed I suspect already one of the award-winning performances of the year, is that of Robin Bailey as Vice Chancellor Sir WilliamGower. From his first appearance from beneath a handkerchief in the awful stillness of Cavendish Square, through his horror at the social ineptitude of the players (“Have we no chairs? Do we lack chairs?”), to his heartbreaking conversion at Rose’s hands to his own theatrical memories (“Kean? Ah Kean: He was a splendid gypsy”), Bailey and Caird have wonderfully recognized that this is essentially a play about Gower and his eventual reawakening to the magic of theater, as much as it is ever about Rose’s marital problems or Tom’s desire to be a revolutionary dramatist.

“Trelawny of the Wells” is that curious contradiction, a great play without being a very good one; but for the second time in 30 years the National has shown us precisely how it should be done.