THEATRE Review: Forty Years On
Alan Bennett’s first play is set in a traditional boys’ school in 1968 – forty years after the end of the Great War which the retiring change-resenting headmaster (Richard Wilson) remembers very clearly. Bennett explores the tension between that and the changes about to be introduced by the incoming head (Alan Cox).
The boys’ school atmosphere with organ loft, lecterns, and desks which whizz on and off stage is so well evoked by Lez Brotherston’s set and the well sung (in harmony) evocative hymns that you can almost smell the floor polish and the chalk. The excellently directed and choreographed community ensemble of school boys adds a lot of authenticity.
Despite his illness last year, be-gowned and in mortarboard, Richard Wilson really runs with it: strangled heightened RP, every vowel distorted, every consonant spat out to the accompanying click of loose dentures. His successor will, as Wilson’s character observes tartly, soon abolish corporal punishment, games and the cadet force because that’s “what liberal teachers do”.
Meanwhile Franklin is mounting a very episodic end of term play which haphazardly recounts the twentieth century history of both Britain and the school. Whenever it strays towards something the headmaster disapproves of sexually or ideologically, he stops it thereby arresting progress towards a more enlightened future.
Although many of the play-within-a-play episodes are hilarious (Danny Lee Wynter hamming up Oscar Wilde and Michael Lin’s tap dance, for example) and the live music is good, the general effect is pretty bitty as we sail through first war tableaux, Virginia Woolf, Ottoline Morrell, TE Lawrence and much more.
The production is an undeniably enjoyable piece of theatre although there is a sense that its director Daniel Evans, in his first season as artistic director at Chichester, may be trying just a tad too hard