Lucy Wills
posted 16 October 2006

To what extent should the personal life of an artist be allowed to inform our understanding of his work? A common enough question, but one which appears to have much possessed playwright Michael Hastings. His last play Calico looked at Samuel Beckett's brief relationship with the mentally ill daughter of his mentor James Joyce. Now, revived at the Almeida, is Hastings's 1984 Royal Court play Tom and Viv, concerning the first marriage of TS Eliot to Vivian Haigh-Wood, the mentally ill daughter of some English aristocrats, of which a nigh-on perfect film version was made just over a decade ago, starring Willem Dafoe as Eliot and Miranda Richardson as Viv.

What is striking is how much more limited and cramped the stage version feels. It is not simply a matter of the Almeida's small playing area, or that cast is cut down to six actors, but that events which are allowed full realisation on screen are here rendered down to reported speech and relayed information. The first time a character steps into the spotlight to address the audience directly, the effect is uncomfortable. The information being given seems almost comically compressed - as if the writer has thrown his hands up in despair at ever successfully conveying the wealth of his research through dialogue, and then decided simply to put someone onstage to explain it all to us instead. It feels, in this instance, like a dated technique, and - worse - like a cop-out. It might have been acceptable in 1984, but nearly a quarter of a century later this sort of didacticism comes across as heavy-handed. And it's not the only thing handled clumsily: the Thorny Facts We're Meant To Know about Thomas Stearns are dropped into the action so heavily that it feels they should be accompanied by a flashing light and a sign underlining the point being made - in the second scene he recites some foul-mouthed doggerel full of Jew-hating nonsense, thus neatly pointing up his anti-Semitism, while later he recounts how he and Viv enjoyed a 'nigger show' on the sea-front, tidily introducing the casual racism of both Eliot and the Edwardians.

It is hard to tell if this heavy-handedness is primarily the fault of the script, however, as some of the performances on show are very much of the same one-note demonstrative variety. Vivian is reportedly mad, so in every scene she is as mad as mad can be. Relentlessly. Frances O'Connor's performance, however, is more reminiscent of a pre-detox Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. Her brother, we are told - repeatedly - is posh and thick, so again that's all he does - to the extent that there's probably more depth to Harry Enfield's portrayal of Tim Nice-But-Dim. The keynote to Eliot's character here is that he is uptight; to this end Will Keen plays the entire piece as if he has tuppence clenched between his buttocks. This may well be a convincing mimicry of one of the 20th century's greatest poets, but it doesn't make for much of an evening in the theatre if the lead is so preoccupied with presenting his subject's repression that there is only a set of twitches and frowns talking at you.

Hastings also has a terrible habit, every time a scene is getting interesting, of suddenly ending it in a violent crescendo with someone shouting something VERY MEANINGFUL. This has the dual effect of making the play seem both melodramatic and ponderous, due the many stops and starts and the hundreds of interminable blackouts between them.

I was genuinely shocked by the gulf between the film, which is an intelligent, sensitive, subtle examination of love, pity, faith, compassion, morality, weakness, artistry and cruelty, and this stage version, which lacks any sense of cohesively presenting anything. It is all the more shocking for the fact that some of the scenes are almost word-for-word transfers between the two mediums. It's not often that I think film beats theatre on the same ground, but here the evidence is incontrovertible. Do yourself a favour; buy the DVD.

Till 4 November 2006.