LETTICE AND LOVAGE

Last week we received the news that Claire Gribben would be starting a new job in the autumn and, in consequence of the travelling that this would be likely to entai, would not be able to take up the part of Lettice in ‘Lettice and Lovage’ under my direction in November.

It was necessary therefore quickly to find a replacement. To cut a long story short, I volunteered myself to play the part, on the basis that I could change the gender of Lettice from female to male. The Committee agreed.

I know this decision will not find universal favour. I want therefore to use this post to explain what lay behind my proposal and the Committee’s acceptance, apart from the need to have a lead actor in place virtually immediately.

Having been the putative director of ‘Lettice’ since the Spring (originally the production was scheduled for July) I had got to know something of the part. It contains some marvellous lines, lines which any actor would enjoy speaking simply for the fun they contain. So I began to learn a few.

But as you speak the lines you quickly realise that it is very hard to discern what gender the character is. Take away the obvious titles like ‘Miss Douffet’ and you are left with sentiments that are more likely to be uttered by men than by women. “Language alone frees one,” says Lettice, “and History gives one place.” Women are not usually given to such pretension, noble though it may be. Men, on the other hand........

Where had I heard such sentiments before I asked myself? Of course, spoken by Jeffrey Bernard. Not those words, no, but similar words. In fact, I concluded, that both ‘Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell’ (which I had performed with CADS in 2003) and ‘Lettice and Lovage’ are, at bottom, very similar plays.

Both are essentially about loss and compensating for loss. For Jeffrey Bernard the compensations for his crumbling life and the decay of Soho’s spirit - “sitting by the bedside of a dying Soho, holding her hand, but wondering whether it would not be kinder to switch off the light,” are racing, alcohol and fanciful reminiscence.

For Lettice, the loss is similar. She mourns the colourful past. “We live in a country now that wants only the mere - mere guides, mere people, mere events,” she exclaims. Her compensation is to escape the present into the fantasy of another age. But like Jeffrey Bernard, her life in late middle-age has crumbled too: she lives alone with her cat bemoaning the modern age that ever more deeply envelopes her. There are no children to call: “my tourists.......are my children....” she observes poignantly.

I should I suppose get away from writing of Lettice as ‘she.’ From now on it will be a man called Lettice. For that is the point: the character, as written, is gender neutral. Lettice is not a mother, she is not a wife or girlfriend, she does not involve herself with the WI, or the hairdresser, she does not buy tights or wear wigs, or keep home or do any of those things that otherwise identify a stage character as female.

And not only that - in his excursions into the past Lettice plays historical figures that are male: Sir John and Sir Nicholas Fustian, Richard III, Charles I, Charles II, Walter Raleigh, Charles I’s executioner, the public prosecutor of the French revolution. The only female character Lettice actually plays is Mary, Queen of Scots (in which role he says nothing anyway). Now it is easier to play male figures, as a man, of course, just as it is to adopt the boldness of style that is part of the Lettice image.

The play was supposed to have been written for Maggie Smith. Whether Maggie Smith arrived while the play was still a blank sheet of paper or whether Peter Shaffer adapted some already formed ideas for a male tourist guide for Maggie Smith, I do not know, but I suspect the latter from the text.

Certainly I find Lettice’s lines very easy to deliver as a man. The lines appear correct, authentic, the sort of thing a man would say in that circumstance, whereas, if I imagine a female Lettice - even when played by Maggie Smith - some of the lines seem a trifle forced, just as the idea of an all female company enacting only the History Plays of Shakespeare in French, in the Dordogne, is forced. Lettice, the woman, playing the part of the male executioner, complete with ‘foinal trappings’ (beard) is forced; her performing the Walter Raleigh cape gesture, as a woman, is forced.

These things can be just as funny, and slightly more realistic, when played by a man. But of course one cannot escape entirely the business of ‘forced.’ There is the Queen of Scots scene, though I cannot accept that a man playing (only briefly of course) the Queen of Scots is anymore of a travesty than a woman playing Charles I or his executioner. Playing Lettice as a man also gives the opportunity to introduce a subfusc element of sexual chemistry into the relationship with Lotte. Even with actresses as talented as Maggie Smith and Margaret Tyzack there is some subtle thing (to my mind) in their long arguments together that is missing.

I had originally conceived that I might play the part as an effeminate, gay, Quentin Crispish sort of man. Indeed, I even considered that I might have done it entirely in drag. While the latter, of course, might have been great fun I am not sure I have the talent for it and certainly, in a female voice, it would become impossible to give the lines in the play the enunciation they deserve. Besides it would turn the show into a pantomime, which would be most sad.

But there is no need. The part works very well as pretty much the character I played in Jeffrey Bernard - philosophical, regretful, by turns sentimental and self-pitying, by turns flamboyant and outrageous. As I said the plays are most similar; let the characters be so too. It will be a great show; of that I have no doubt. We have a great team, the play offers wonderful ‘coups de theatre;’ it will be a credit to CADS.