Theater: Mothball Melodrama

The Right Honourable Gentleman, by Michael Dyne. They don’t write plays like this any more. Thank goodness. Gentleman is a neo-relict from the mothballed fleet of melodramas that Shaw laid to rust when he attacked the theater of genteel piffle. Those bygone plays were Victorian clutched-handkerchief-and-smelling-salts operas. With more calculation than wit, Playwright Dyne drapes sex in bombazine, drops gossip in pear-shaped tones, dredges up his plot from an actual 1885 scandal, and clearly depends on fresh memories of the Profumo affair to titillate his audience and breathe secondhand life into his play.

Sir Charles Dilke (Charles D. Gray) is an eminent Liberal Party politician with excellent prospects of entering Gladstone’s Cabinet. He is also a man with an indecorous sexual past. A young Mrs. Crawford (Sarah Badel), anxious to free herself from a disastrous marriage, arms her impotent husband with the information that she has not only committed adultery with Dilke but has also been his partner in more orgiastic antics. Though possibly innocent of wrongdoing with Mrs. Crawford, Sir Charles dare not defend his name, since he is guilty of a previous liaison with her mother (Coral Browne). The Crawford divorce case shakes England and blights Dilke’s career.

It scarcely matters how closely Dyne sticks to the historical record, since he remains resolutely distant from life. His stage tactic is to open his characters’ mail in public, as it were, but never to disclose their hearts, minds and motives. Acting with urbane finesse, the cast can probe no deeper than its period costumes. The players enunciate all too perfectly some of the woolliest period dialogue of recent seasons. Item: “God, how can I silence this monstrous woman?” Item: “But you betrayed something in me, [soulful pause] deep, deep in me.” Double item: Husband—”Have you defiled my bed?” Wife [tinkle of silvery laughter]—”Oh Donald, you must be the only man in England who would use such an expression.”

Well, almost the only man.