Larkin
Our Verdict: 4 Stars
Ben Brown’s modest play at the Mary Wallace pleasingly evokes that most modest of poets and his era through three decades of his life and loves.
Though one of the great English poets of the 20th century, ranked near Auden and Ted Hughes and brave on the page Philip Larkin’s personality was exceptionally meek. Perhaps this explains the meagre quantity of his poetry if not its quality. Ultimately, he would turn down the greatest accolade a poet can receive, the public role of Poet Laureate.
The play, however, is not overly concerned with the creative quandaries of Larkin the artist so much as his daytime job as a modest librarian in a provincial town, albeit Chief Librarian of the University; and on the other hand, his quasi-polygamous relationship with three women, Monica, Maeve and Betty, from the mid-1950s to his early death in 1985 at the age of 63 (from oesophageal cancer having been a lifelong smoker).
The stage set comprises two halves alternately lit emphasizing starkly the division between his office at the library and his living room at home. The three relationships unfold simultaneously over thirty years in brief intimate scenes punctuated by snippets of his bleak lyrics. The décor and references to the wider world progress, like the play itself, at a stately pace reminding those with a historical imagination of the customs and morals of a different, timeless England now utterly erased by Thatcher and Blair.
For many in this charming little riverside theatre that seat no more than a hundred the appeal of the play must have been pure nostalgia. I noticed nobody there younger than 50-years old. The youths in the pub across the way missed a gem brought to life by an amateur cast as capable as professionals.
His women knew about one another but Larkin, embarrassed to admit the truth, kept them apart and lived mostly alone satisfied with sexual friendship but refusing until it was too late to matter what the women wanted - to marry. But each continued to love him dearly to the end despite the frustration.
From his perspective, uninterested in children or domesticity, he enjoyed the best of three worlds. Monica Jones, a lecturer in English Literature at Leicester who provided intellectual and literary companionship was closest to being his “real” wife, while Maeve Brennan, a meek unassuming Catholic whom he called his “mouse” shared his purity of heart and aroused in him the romantic yearning that underpins his verse, and the third was buxom Betty Mackareth, a full-bodied, sensual, no-nonsense, worldly woman who as both his secretary and inamorata understood every aspect of his life except the poetry.
The world turned and Larkin was left behind. He wrote next to nothing after 1974. If the play has a problem it is the difficulty of squeezing the complexities of four lives and their interwoven relationships over thirty years into the two-hour traffic of the stage. Even so, this production succeeds in providing more than a glimpse of the man who expressed the emotional life of England between the end of empire and the pop revolution of the 1960s.
Details
Venue: The Mary Wallace Theatre, Twickenham
Upcoming Shows & Times:
Saturday 15 to Saturday 22 September
Sunday 16 September at 3 pm
Tickets: richmondshakespeare.org.uk
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