With Lawrence of Arabia only a week away from re-release, I'm dusting off a long-mothballed post: a review of Robert Bolt's oeuvre. Bolt did his most lasting work as a screenwriter, yet he was also a prolific stage dramatist. Aside from A Man for All Seasons however, his plays are mostly forgotten.
In the early '60s, Bolt went from Mancunian schoolmaster to theatrical superstar with a trio of hits: Flowering Cherry, The Tiger and the Horse and A Man for All Seasons. Bolt's ability to analyze political issues through individual protagonists won him acclaim and popular appeal. But he was also dismissed by many: John Russell Taylor called him "a good old-fashioned playwright" like Terence Rattigan, telling conventional stories within familiar dramatic structures. Bolt's conventionality marginalized him in the era of John Osborne and Harold Pinter's "Angry Young Men," despite his flirtations with Brechtian "epic theater" in A Man for All Seasons and Gentle Jack. Even so, success brought him to David Lean and Sam Spiegel's attention, and the rest is history.
Certainly Bolt proved a gifted screenwriter. His eye for striking visuals, skilful treatment of complex themes, sharp characterizations and poetic dialogue made him ideally suited for film. Cinema allowed him a vast canvas for his preoccupations: war-torn Arabia, Revolutionary Russia, the Paraguayan jungle. By contrast, later plays like Vivat! Vivat Regina and State of Revolution suffer from excesses of characters and incident. Frith Banbury scoffed at Bolt's choice of "Sam Spiegel's yacht" over theater accolades, but one can hardly blame Bolt for focusing on a medium where he excelled.
Nonetheless, Bolt's stage work is worth remembering. His plays bristle with quotable dialogue and fascinating themes: the individual against society, the agony of conscience, the juxtaposition of personal and political, commitment versus compromise. Even when Bolt fails, he's usually interesting.
Seven of Bolt's plays have been published: Flowering Cherry (1958), The Tiger and the Horse (1960), A Man for All Seasons (1960), Gentle Jack (1963), The Thwarting of Baron Bolligrew (1964), Vivat! Vivat Regina (1970) and State of Revolution (1977). Of Bolt's other work, The Last of the Wine (1955) remains unpublished, while The Critic and the Heart (1957) and Brother and Sister (1966) only received limited printings. I'll recuse myself from reviewing A Man for All Seasons for a third time. All six plays examined are flawed but comprise an interesting body of work regardless.
Flowering Cherry (1958)
“Your apples and orchards, your dreams; your one dream – it’s nothing but a lie and an excuse for lies and lies!”
Bolt's debut The Critic and the Heart proved a minor success, but Flowering Cherry propelled him to theatrical stardom. The show ran at London’s Haymarket Theatre for over a year, starring Ralph Richardson and Celia Johnson. The play received positive reviews, with Harold Hobson particularly effusive: “Bolt looks on the withering misery, the complete self-contempt with the cold eye of a surgeon and with the … perceptiveness of a Proust.” A short Broadway run with Eric Portman and Wendy Hiller proved less successful.
The story is Arthur Miller by way of Chekhov. Insurance man Jack Cherry dreams of retiring to a cherry orchard in Somerset. He constantly threatens to quit his job, his erratic behavior driving wife Isobel batty. Things come to a head over a petty theft, with Cherry accusing his wayward son Tom, and when Cherry contemplates selling the family house. Isobel finally confronts Cherry over his self-destructive actions.
Bolt claimed to be unfamiliar with Death of a Salesman but this is hard to credit. Parallels to Miller’s magnum opus are inescapable: the husband wrapped up in delusions, the long-suffering but defensive wife, the dishonest children. Echoes of The Cherry Orchard further slather Cherry with discreditable familiarity. The most original elements are the most awkward: Cherry’s daughter Judy, a silly poker-bending stunt, and a projected cyclorama of cherry petals in the breeze. There’s a nod to the “Angry Young Man” in Tom, the disaffected Army-bound son, but otherwise this is a stolidly adult play.
Attentive readers will notice Boltian themes in embryonic form. Cherry certainly faces a question of commitment, albeit on a more personal scale than later works. A dichotomy between the “business world,” represented by the salesman Grass, and the “Natural” world represented by Cherry’s orchard, is a rough draft for Gentle Jack’s central dichotomy. But these are sublimated to the banal domestic drama.
Of course, judging any play solely by its text is problematic. A good, well-cast production might make these tired elements work: certainly Ralph Richardson and Celia Johnson could breathe life into anything. Without a production nearby however, I’m forced to judge Cherry on its literary merits, which are minimal.
The Tiger and the Horse (1960)
“I have no permissive authority over the importance of things. If they’re important to you, than to you they’re important.”
In 1960, Bolt had the honor of two plays running simultaneously on the West End. Though written before A Man for All Seasons, The Tiger and the Horse was launched two months’ into that show’s run. It did better business at the time, because of another brilliant casting coup: Michael Redgrave in the lead and Vanessa Redgrave, in her first major stage role, as daughter Stella.
Despite its contemporary success, Tiger has faded into a theatrical footnote. For all its dated topicality and artificial plot mechanics it retains considerable power. Tiger is Bolt’s first work to fully develop his themes of self-hood and individual commitment.
Jack Dean is a professor at an unnamed Oxbridge University. A former astronomer, he's taken himself out of the "real world" by studying philosophy. He's next in line for promotion to Vice Chancellor until research fellow Louis Flax presents Dean with a petition for nuclear disarmament. Dean refuses to sign, alienating his wife Gwendoline, for whom the petition takes on incredible importance. Dean's pressed to make a choice, however, when Louis impregnates Dean's daughter Stella, and when Gwendoline loses her grip on sanity.
Tiger was an immensely personal project for Bolt. He was an active member of Bertrand Russell’s Committee of 100, which advocated nuclear disarmament. He contributed an essay to Clara Urquhart's anti-nuke book A Matter of Life (1963) and explored the issue in his play The Last of the Wine. In September 1961 Bolt was arrested for taking part in a protest in Trafalgar Square, only to be bailed out by a furious Sam Spiegel, who needed Bolt to write Lawrence of Arabia. Bolt’s failure to live up to his fictional protagonists haunted him for the rest of his life.
Tiger remains effective despite its dated central issue. Like many Bolt protagonists, Dean tries to "have it both ways," avoiding controversy at the cost of principle. Bolt effectively contrasts him with Louis, a politically committed busybody who can't tell Stella he loves her. Bolt further personalizes the drama with Gwendoline, who goes mad contemplating the horrors of nuclear war and her husband's lack of affection. The stakes aren't so far-reaching as A Man for All Seasons but serve a powerful drama; Bolt shows that even abstract issues effect everyone.
When Bolt focuses on Dean's dilemma, Tiger excels. Unfortunately, the play becomes weighed down in subplots and awkward characterization. Louis and Stella's romance initially provides comic relief, but never develops enough weight to balance the main story. Gwendoline's descent into madness seems abrupt, with her climactic action occurring offstage. In the final scenes, character development, plot mechanics and thematic concerns conveniently come to a head. Fortunately, these flaws are “outweighed by the forcefulness of [Bolt's] speeches” (Sabine Prufer), resulting in a powerful if didactic conclusion.
If Tiger is a formative work, it’s certainly an interesting one. Bolt would soon refine its themes and characterizations into his finest stage achievement.
Gentle Jack (1963)
"A dog with its teeth in another dog’s throat is not so terrible, as a man in an office.”
Gentle Jack’s disastrous West End run, starring Kenneth Williams, Dame Edith Evans and Michael Bryant, is legendary. Miscast stars, extraordinarily hostile audiences and merciless critics quickly buried it. Tribune Magazine’s scathing review is representative: “What could have been delightful as a fantasy takes on the tedious aspect of a charade.” The play was cancelled after 75 shows and has never been revived. Williams parlayed the experience into hysterical anecdotes, especially concerning the stuffy Dame Edith.
Jack is a fascinating failure. It's Bolt's most ambitious play, replete with striking themes and creative imagery shaped into a supernatural parable. Unfortunately Bolt botches the presentation, resulting in a melange of half-baked, garbled ideas.
Mild-mannered banker Jacko Cadence accompanies boss Violet Lazara, to Attis Abbey. Jacko’s family owned the Abbey until Violet swindled it from them; she regards Jacko with a mixture of pity and contempt. Jacko loathes the countryside and fends off the advances of local tart Penelope. Jacko gets mixed up in a local ceremony summoning the Nature spirit Jack-in-the-Green. It turns out Jack is very real, and he invests Jacko with otherworldly powers to make his presence known on Earth. But Jacko proves reluctant to abandon the “logical” world completely, infuriating Jack.
Gentle Jack takes the conflict between “Natural Man” and his professional responsibilities to its extreme. Here it’s a literal dichotomy, the forces of “Office” and “Nature” depicted as constantly warring, antithetical. Violet’s financial successes leaves her frigid and sexless. Her affection for assistant Bilbo appears chaste and she cannot transcend her professional avarice. The amoral Jack, comprising “cruelty and tenderness in equal measure,” is a fascinating creation. Execution aside, the development of this dichotomy is spot-on.
Jacko is a “natural butt” ill at ease in both universes, held in contempt by everyone. His coworkers ridicule him, the lusty Penelope taunts him, the workers at Attis Abbey resent his comparative wealth. Jacko puts his newfound power to good use, finding fulfillment in helping others. But he refuses to commit a pointless murder. Trying to straddle the fence between both worlds merely enrages both. Bolt presents another dilemma of commitment, but here “the choice Jacko is given is not a feasible one.” (Prufer)
Drawing heavily on the Theatre of the Absurd, Bolt envisions a living, almost surreal set. The drab office world collides with a vividly rendered forest, complete with foliage, falling fruits and a soundtrack of bees. From page descriptions, it would require an imaginative director to pull off. Bolt’s emphasis on visuals speaks to why he was a better screenwriter than playwright.
Unfortunately, these ideas smother under over-baked folderol. The first act sees Bolt piling on a multitude of characters that stifle development. Minor characters like the Brackets, an unhappy old couple, Gaston and Cynthia, two young but squeamish lovers and a gaggle of estate workers, serve little story function despite much attention. The effect is dramatic congestion, with each personage vying for attention through overripe monologues and witticisms. There’s too much going on and the play becomes sluggish and boring.
With Jack’s belated arrival, the play finally comes to life. Jack’s speeches about Nature’s amorality are powerfully rendered, and Jacko solving characters’ assorted problems provides sardonic mirth – more so when his solutions prove unsatisfactory. His romance with Penelope takes on an appropriately tragic edge in this context. Events build to a climax both comic and horrifying; Jack’s plea for “an animal in the House,” lapsing into nursery rhyme and Welsh dialect, strikes an appropriately perverse note.
But even here Bolt fudges things. He establishes Jack and Violet as polar opposites, representatives of Nature and the Office destined to collide. Intruding however is Morgan, a snooty mathematician presented as a “man of Logic.” This minor character squares off with Jack at the denouement, with Violet emerging not only unscathed but unchallenged. “The play confuses because it doesn’t succeed in focusing the unreasonableness,” Ronald Hayman notes.
Jack's failure sent Bolt further into the arms of Hollywood: he soon divorced his first wife, married Sarah Miles and re-joined David Lean for Doctor Zhivago. In the late ‘70s Bolt began revising the play, a project put paid by his crippling stroke. A shame, as there’s clearly a good play somewhere amidst the muddle.
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I hope you've all enjoyed this slight deviation from the cinematic. My next installment will examine Bolt's final three plays. There may be movie reviews in the meantime, so stick around.
Note on Sources:
Besides Bolt’s plays themselves, my primary sources for this article are: Robert Bolt by Ronald Hayman (1969), Sabine Prufer’s The Individual at the Crossroads: The Works of Robert Bolt, Playwright, Screenwriter and Novelist (1999), and Adrian Turner’s Robert Bolt: Scenes from Two Lives (1998). All quotes and citations derive from them, including critic reviews, unless otherwise indicated.
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