✭✭✭✭✩

by Emlyn Williams, directed by Sean Mathias

Bill Kenwright Ltd, Theatre Royal Windsor, Windsor, GBR

June 6-15, 2024

Rona: “Doctor Jekyll is anxious to marry you if you’ll have him, but Mr. Hyde insists on being at the wedding”

Emlyn Williams (1905-87) is still well-known as an actor and writer. His play Night Must Fall (1935) has been filmed three times as has his most famous play, The Corn Is Green (1938), In contrast, his play Accolade has, until recently, lain unperformed since its premiere in 1950 until it was revived by the Finborough Theatre in 2011. It’s a play whose subject matter and Williams’s approach to it are so controversial that it is incredible that Lord Chamberlain's Office allowed it to be staged uncensored. We are used to thinking that destroying a great person’s reputation by revealing unsavoury aspects of their personal life is a modern phenomenon. Williams’s riveting play proves it is not. Director Sean Mathias and his well-chosen cast are immensely successful advocates for Williams’s play and its continuing relevance.

The play is set in the study of Will Trenting in his house in Regent’s Park, London – a handsome, wood-panelled, book-lined room designed by Julie Godfrey redolent of wealth and culture. The action begins on the morning of New Year’s Day 1950 and covers a period of three months. Trenting has already won a Nobel Prize for his novels exploring life among the lower depths of London. The New Year is initially a cause for celebration since it is announced that Trenting is on the King’s Honours list to receive a knighthood for his services to literature. The first of the play’s six scenes is taken up with the spread of the news among Trenting’s family and friends. Eventually, Trenting and his family have to make an attempt to live life amid the glare of publicity.

In Scene 2, three months later, events have taken a distinctly negative turn. A newspaper has gotten hold of a story claiming that Trenting had attended a “dirty party” at a pub called the Blue Lion in Rotherhithe only a week before the new year. Trenting’s publisher, Thane Lampeter, assumes it is a malicious lie, but Trenting has to disabuse him of the idea. Trenting did attend such a party and it was rather less a party than an “orgy” as Trenting (and Williams) call it.

One might think that that was the worst of Trenting’s news. Instead, Williams has structured the play as a series of increasingly surprising revelations about Trenting’s private life and what precisely occurred at the party in Rotherhithe. Soon enough we discover that Trenting’s participation in an orgy was not an aberration. Rather, Trenting periodically acts on an overwhelming compulsion to revel in anonymous sex and has done so all his life. Even more surprising is that his wife Rona married him knowing this fact and knows what his various weekend absences from home mean. She says that when Trenting proposed to her, he said, “Doctor Jekyll is anxious to marry you if you’ll have him, but Mr. Hyde insists on being at the wedding”.

You might wonder that a wife could be so tolerant. But as Rona asks her friend Marian, “Is it better to have husband hide his secret affair on the side or for him to tell you honestly what he is doing?” Rona knows that her marriage to Trenting gave his life a stability it would never have had, a stability to write and become famous for his writing. She knows that compared to her husband’s periodic fevers, she and their son – are everything to him.

Williams, indeed, would know this situation well because he based Trenting on himself and Rona on his own wife. Williams did not win the Nobel Prize and he would not be knighted until 1962, but he did have sex outside of marriage on a regular basis with the full knowledge of his wife Molly Shan, a fact that he emphasizes in both of his autobiographies George (1961) and Emlyn (1973). What Williams omits about himself from his portrait of Trenting is his own bisexuality. We assume that Williams thought mentioning heterosexual orgies was pushing the envelope far enough, whereas mentioning bisexuality might get the play banned. Even so, Williams manages to insinuate into his text the notion that the “parties” Trenting attends may not be entirely heterosexual.

That Accolade would take on such incendiary subject matter makes the play remarkable enough for 1950. What makes the play remarkable even today is that revealing of Trenting’s secret life is not the main point of the play. Trenting’s wife, his secretary, his two friends from Rotherhithe who organize the “parties” and eventually his publisher all know Trenting’s secret. The real question is what to do when this secret becomes known to the general public. In this way Accolade becomes a critique of the hypocrisy of trial-by-media, a situation too well known to public figures in the 21st century.

Director Sean Mathias has assembled a mostly excellent cast who speak Williams’s dialogue as naturally and persuasively as if it were new. The production’s main flaw is the rather underpowered Will Trenting of Ayden Callaghan. We don’t want melodrama from him but it would certainly help if her were able to exude more vitality. Callaghan tends to wander about the stage in a generally shell-shocked state, either at becoming a knight or at having his private life become public.

What really makes us believe in Callaghan’s Trenting is Honeysuckle Weeks’s defiantly no-nonsense performance as Trenting’s wife Rona. Weeks plays Rona as the sober, sensible one of the couple and yet also manages to suggest that always having to be the solid rock for an errant husband is not without strain.

As Trenting’s publisher, Thane Lampeter, David Phelan takes on the role the audience is presumed to have – sympathetic to Trenting yet aghast at his moral depravity. Phelan, however, shows that Lampeter is enough of a loyal friend and pragmatist that helping Trenting is still a duty he owes him. A parallel character to Lampeter is Trenting’s secretary Albert played by Jamie Hogarth with a wonderful mixture of gravitas and shrewdness. Hogarth shows us that Albert knows everything but also gives nothing away.

Gavin Fowler and Sarah Twomey provide comic relief as lowlifes Harold and Phyllis who arrange and participate in the orgies Trenting attends. We are at first surprised that Trenting and Rona welcome this rather too flashy couple so warmly until we understand the strange link they have to Trenting’s clandestine activities.

Narinder Samra makes Trenting’s prime accuser, Daker, into a complex, dangerous figure. Many accounts of the play call Daker a blackmailer, but that is inaccurate. What Samra shows so well is that Daker, enraged because his own daughter was at the same “party” as Trenting, is so disturbed by the fact that he really doesn’t know what he wants from Trenting. He rejects money outright but has not yet decided how Trenting should be punished. As a failed novelist, Samra’s Daker is envious of the way Trenting lives and the honours he has received. His most disturbing idea is that he become part of Trenting’s household. Yet, when Trenting counters Daker with a show of force, Daker takes the only logical course open to him.

Louis Holland flits in and out of scenes as Trenting’s bookish 14-year-old son Ian. The best scene Holland has in the play occurs when Trenting is forced to tell Ian what precisely he has done to cause the family so much trouble. Holland manages to indicate that Ian is eager to understand what Trenting is saying but does not really understand what he means. Mathias strangely makes Ian a focus in the play, first appearing in a type of semi-transparent tube, then pulling a curtain past the stage opening to change scenes, then sometimes standing in a pin spotlight. One gathers that Mathias wants us to think that even though Trenting believes he has so constructed his life that he can not hurt anyone as innocent as Ian, the reality is that Trenting’s actions affect everyone he knows.

Accolade is a powerful play where we are torn between leniency and strict judgement of its central character. Trenting and Rona make much of Trenting’s absolute honesty which contrasts with the dishonesty of the press that so willingly exalt Trenting one day and gleefully tear him down three months later. But while we may decry the opportunistic press, we also have to recognize that the Trentings’ admirable policy of honesty is useless when confronting an outside world ready to believe the worst. This is a great play to prompt debate on a wide range of topics and one that fits in perfectly with the Shaw Festival of Canada’s original mandate were that company bold enough to stage it.

Christopher Hoile

Tour:

• June 18-22: Cambridge Arts Theatre, Cambridge

• June 25-29: Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford

• July 2-6: Theatre Royal, Bath

• July 9-13: Richmond Theatre, Richmond

Photos: Louis Holland as Ian Trenting, Honeysuckle Weeks as Rona Trenting and Ayden Callaghan as Will Trenting; David Phelan as Thane Lampeter, Ayden Callaghan as Will Trenting, Sarah Twomey as Phyllis, Honeysuckle Weeks as Rona Trenting, Gavin Fowler as Harold, Jamie Hogarth as Albert and Narinder Samra as Daker, Honeysuckle Weeks as Rona Trenting. © 2024 Jack Merriman.

For tickets visit: www.kenwright.com.