Ross - Chichester Festival Theatre

Forgot to write about this (been distracted by Brexit and Wimbledon, been a strange few weeks for a few reasons) but the news that this may be transferring justifies my egotistical need to share my thoughts.

You’d think that, Ross being unfortunately programmed almost alongside Lawrence After Arabia, watching it would be a strange experience of deja vu. It is, but not because of that – Fiennes holds himself the equal(ish) to Laskey (who I thought was tremendous in a mediocre script, though the more I’ve thought about Lawrence After Arabia the more I like it) and the two works occupy their two worlds.  The more unfortunate timing coincidence is the play’s premiere in 1960 and the movie’s premiere in 1962 – after fifty years of praise for that masterpiece of a movie, Rattigan’s play struggles to find a need to be revived, sadly. There is stuff to admire in the production, and it’s an interesting footnote of a play, but it’s a bit of a damp squib, ultimately, partly down to Rattigan’s lack of skill at a biographer, and mostly down to Lawrence's legacy living on most prominently elsewhere.

To be oversimplistic, Rattigan writes about Rattiganesque characters – repressed, quiet, introverted, uncertain, homosexual or tacitly homosexual. Lawrence should be all these things – indeed, aside from not being upfront about his homosexuality, he is. And at moments, Lawrence becomes a cousin to Hester Collyer or Crocker-Harris or Major Pollock – these are mostly the moments where Lawrence is Ross, hiding himself, struggling to refrain from being himself yet desperate not to be himself. There’s a wonderful Rattigan play about this moment in Lawrence’s life alone, and an irritatingly promising hint at the exposition-free play this could have been (and would have been had the movie come out first, one assumes). The issue is less that Lawrence isn’t such a Rattiganesque man (the Ross scenes work well in that Ratty way), but that Lawrence’s life is more about the events than emotion, the outer not the inner life. And so, just as the play sets up an interesting conflict of Lawrence both becoming a legend and trying to shed his fame, Rattigan flashes back to Arabia, scraps the Ross character conflict, and just tells a biography of a man in the war. Imagine if half way through The Deep Blue Sea Helen McCrory packed up her bags and not just join the territorial army, but talk about joining it, endlessly. Because there are so many events in the life of Lawrence, there is so much exposition in this play about him, and exposition trumps repression, quietness, introversion, uncertainty and homosexuality, and eventually the play stops being about the character conflict and starts being about character plot, plot and nothing but plot. Lawrence as a Rattiganesque character does not correlate with Lawrence the military man, and where the Ross scenes are character scenes about his inner life, the bulk of Ross is Lawrence in Arabia. Rattigan tells the story in a way that a) doesn’t suit his insular style and b) was done better by Bolt.

You see, the sad, simple and should-be-irrelevant but must-be-mentioned truth of the matter is that this 1960 play has since been wholly eclipsed by 1962’s Lawrence of Arabia – not just Lean’s movie, but Robert Bolt’s study of TE Lawrence as a repressed, quiet, introverted uncertain homosexual. For all that we remember the film for David Lean’s vision, for Maurice Jarre’s iconic score, for Nic Roeg and Freddy Young’s stunning series of set-pieces, and for Peter O’Toole’s eyes, it’s as much a masterpiece for Robert Bolt’s script, a script which would probably make for a better stage play than Rattigan’s Ross. In A Man for All Seasons Bolt wrote a focused and clear study of identity, will, self-belief and the difficulties thereof; in Lawrence of Arabia he wrote the same but with better scenery and more camels. Where Rattigan has to detail the major events – the plans, the raids, Arabia itself – one shot in a movie does this for Bolt. Where Rattigan has to have Lawrence explain his sexual uncertainty, his manic privacy, his horror at warfare, Bolt leaves it to some well-placed questions and O’Toole’s eyes, and says more about introversion with less dialogue than Rattigan can say when filling a theatre. Where Rattigan has to suggest or discuss the madness and brutality of war, Bolt can sit back, let Lean do the heavy lifting, then pick up where Lean left off. Bolt's character, as such, is a more convincing introverted, repressed homosexual Rattigan usually writes, but with none of the over-expository biography Rattigan has to write. Much as the best scene in Lean/Bolt’s Doctor Zhivago is the scene of Omar Shariff taking in the horror of the Cossack attack through his eyes, Bolt’s show-don’t-tell attitude to acts of warfare allows for a more compellingly introverted tale of an introvert that Rattigan can’t tell, and paradoxically shouldn’t – why on earth would a repressed, secretive semi-spy be so explanatory in what he's doing and how he's feeling? So, to have either the real Lawrence or the Rattiganised Lawrence spill the beans is out of character. Now, this is why Brenton’s play ends up just having the upper hand – Brenton knows not to repeat an iconic film or now famous plot-points (apart from the Saint Joan mumbo-jumbo, he dealt with exposition just fine), whilst Rattigan’s play, coming before Bolt, now reads like a run-of-the-mill first draft to a history lesson that needs more introversion, more control, less telling and more showing.

Despite the play being a somewhat stilted character study, Joseph Fiennes was very good. Where Laskey played Lawrence by displaying years of age in his youthful little face, Fiennes has a faux over-confidence that suits this play well. He has that sense of doing the right thing but not knowing why it’s right, from his phoney salute to his lax leadership, and gives a compellingly uncertain performance. He’s very good, actually, he conveys youthful uncertainty developing into permanent self-doubt very affectingly. Peter Polycarpau, as always, was strong. Michael Feast was meant to play a middle eastern warlord, but when I saw it he was understudied by Alexander Meerkat. Or Feast was very hammy.

Both because the film’s since outshone it, and the play’s not much cop itself, Ross ends up as Lawrence of Arabia but with dialogue instead of set pieces, exposition instead of characterisation. It’s one time where the movie is the better medium, far more capable of show don’t tell, and even disregarding that Noble is no Lean, there’s a visual flatness to this too, a flatness which comes from this being, ultimately, a sub-par Rattigan with more plot than it’s worth. I’m being rather negative, truth be told I enjoyed it well enough (slightly less than Lawrence After Arabia), but it’s a funny one – Brenton turned Lawrence into a milquetoast Brentonesque politico and shuns the biography, but Rattigan doesn't quite turn Lawrence into any form of Rattiganesque self-doubter because the plot gets in the way, and all Ross ends up being is a moderately interesting, passably entertaining retelling of a biography told better elsewhere.  If only the play had been written three years later, what an opportunity that would have been. Its dramatic raison d’etre seems to have been less to turn Lawrence into Major Pollock and more to tell Lawrence’s life to a large audience, and sadly along came Bolt and along came Lean, and as such the play’s sadly dated. Fiennes is very good, Rattigan less so, Noble less so too. A three stars perfectly good, perfectly entertaining piece of work, but with the caveat that – dare I say – the movie has a better script, and not everything is better in the theatre...

P.S. I’ve been to Chichester a few times now, but strangely never visited the cathedral. It’s lovely! And absolutely worth seeing for that wonderful tomb, of course.

P.P.S. Forget Rattigan, Bolt, forget Brenton. It’s Bennett who’s written best on Tee Hee Lawrence.