TV review

James Ormerod (1966)

In Joe Orton’s The Erpingham Camp, the punishment and defeat of a hubristic, controlling individual by disordering forces is inspired by Euripides’ The Bacchae.  Orton’s setting – a holiday camp ruled by the megalomaniac Erpingham – is decidedly English and contemporary.  The holidaymakers’ rebellion against Erpingham and his acolytes turns the play into an expanding political satire with strong anti-religious implications.  And, on the page, it’s so funny:  if how much you laugh is the sole criterion of a comedy’s quality then The Erpingham Camp is the best comic theatre piece I’ve ever read.  It was staged for the first time at the Royal Court in June 1967, in a Crimes of Passion double bill with The Ruffian on the Stair.  In his diaries, Orton describes the piece as a Brecht parody and the introductory stage directions in the play text are clear:  ‘No attempt must be made to reproduce the various locales in a naturalistic manner’.  When he revised it for the stage, Orton had learned from the previous year’s television version of The Erpingham Camp.

The empire of Erpingham (Reginald Marsh) starts to crumble after he reluctantly gives Chief Redcoat[1] Riley (Peter Reeves) his big chance and Riley, as entertainments compere for the night, loses control of the campers.  James Ormerod spends too much time giving Riley a ludicrous big stage entrance then on the competitions for the campers – for the best pair of male legs and the loudest female scream – that backfire in a big way.  Things go from bad to worse not just for Erpingham and Riley but for Ormerod:  studio-based TV drama of the 1960s wasn’t well equipped for the semi-realistic staging of turbulent crowd scenes.  Ormerod depicts an upsurge of chaos but not in the way Orton intended:  this Erpingham Camp is riotous only in the sense that a mess of actors and extras run about yelling at one another.  It’s a pity because there are some good performances – from Reginald Marsh, Peter Honri (as W E Harrison, Erpingham’s unfailingly polite whipping boy) and, especially, Angela Pleasence.   She plays the pregnant Eileen, whose overenthusiastic contribution to the screaming contest is the start of Chief Redcoat Riley’s difficulties.  Perhaps it’s in the genes (see comments on her father below) but Angela Pleasence works up a fine, sustained hysteria.

The Erpingham Camp was broadcast in June 1966 as the ‘pride’ segment of ITV (Rediffusion)’s Seven Deadly Sins series of plays, commissioned from different authors by the executive producer Peter Willes.  The next year, Willes followed up with Seven Deadly Virtues.  Orton supplied The Good and Faithful Servant – in the ‘faith’ slot.  (Frank Marcus and Bill Naughton were among the other writers who contributed to Willes’s series.)  James Ormerod directed again and he too had evidently learned from the experience of Erpingham.  The Good and Faithful Servant has a few flat spots but is, for the most part, much tighter and more coherent.  This is an unusual Orton piece:  the often funny but essentially sad story of George Buchanan, who retires after fifty years with the same firm, is driven by angry sympathy for working people most of whose existence is spent – in the play’s view, wasted – in loyal servitude.  (It’s been suggested that Orton had the lives of some of his Leicester relatives in mind.)   James Ormerod reinforces the straight-faced political aspect by showing factory machinery in remorseless motion – with not a human being in sight – over the opening and closing titles.

On the morning of his last day at work, the doorman Buchanan (Donald Pleasence) encounters, he thinks for the first time, Edith (Hermione Baddeley), who’s been cleaning floors in the building for the past half-century:

Buchanan:  I’ve been here for fifty years, too.  How strange we’ve never met.

Edith:  Which gate do you use?

Buchanan:  Number eight.

Edith:  Ah, well, you see, that explains it.  I’ve always entered by number fifteen.

Buchanan and Edith quickly discover they met once before:  he made her pregnant many years ago.  Edith lives with their grandson, Raymond (Richard O’Callaghan), the orphaned love child of one of the twin boys (it was never established which one) fathered by Buchanan.  Raymond, who’s unemployed, has maintained the family tradition with his girlfriend Debbie (Sheila White), a typist with the same firm that Buchanan and Edith work for, and now expecting.  Buchanan is determined to do, belatedly, the right thing:  after retiring, he marries Edith.  He’s also vigorously censorious of Raymond – for repeating the sins of his forefathers and, even worse, for not having a job.

The young couple’s problems are eventually solved through what might ironically be described as the good offices of Mrs Vealfoy (Patricia Routledge), the firm’s personnel officer.  By the end of The Good and Faithful Servant, Raymond and Debbie have married, he has joined the firm’s workforce and there’s a place for their baby in the workplace crèche.   Buchanan is pressed by Mrs Vealfoy to attend the ‘Bright Hours’ club:  to be eligible for membership – ‘The person or persons of either sex must be old, lonely and ex-members of the firm.  No other qualifications are needed’.  Buchanan puts in an appearance but, only a few months on his retirement, no one else in the ‘Bright Hours’ club remembers him – one old man (Jack Bligh) thinks he does, before realising he’s confusing Buchanan with a different George.  Buchanan goes home, takes to his bed and, in despair, dies there.

As that synopsis suggests, the firm in The Good and Faithful Servant is both personally insensitive to its employees and sinisterly controlling of them, from cradle to grave.  One of the script’s chief strengths is the embodiment of this tyranny in a single character, the briskly efficient personnel officer (a pity that Orton died before the term ‘human resources’ was common currency) – and Patricia Routledge’s Mrs Vealfoy is the great asset of the ITV production, though the acting is strong throughout the cast.  As she proved in later Alan Bennett plays – in Doris and Doreen (1978), in A Visit from Miss Prothero (1978) and, especially, as Miss Schofield in A Woman of No Importance (1982) – Routledge has a unique ability to realise spirit of place when the place is a mid-twentieth-century office.  As the smilingly coercive and ruthless Mrs Vealfoy, she’s a gripping incarnation of bossy bureaucratic certitude.  This woman is a monster but she’s a physically elegant and vocally persuasive one:  the scene in which Mrs Vealfoy seduces Raymond into the world of work, in a manner that suggests she has sexual seduction in mind, is especially striking and effective.

Donald Pleasence ensures that Buchanan isn’t simply and prematurely pathetic but there are disadvantages to this interesting piece of casting.  Pleasence is unquestionably magnetic but too idiosyncratic in the role.  For the scene in which his commissionaire’s uniform has been put on a tailor’s dummy and Buchanan emerges from a changing cubicle in civvies, Orton’s script notes that, out of uniform, he ‘appears smaller, shrunken and insignificant’.  Donald Pleasence doesn’t, either here or subsequently.  According to Orton’s diaries, it was Pleasence’s decision to wear (what are obviously) dentures.  The appendage is resonant, given the importance of false teeth in Loot and Orton’s account of his mother’s death, but it unhelpfully makes Pleasence look even more singular than he already does.  In the early scenes, there’s a slight military twang to his voice; as the play goes on, his accent becomes more all-purpose ordinary man.  I wasn’t sure if this was intentional, reflecting Buchanan’s descent into helpless anonymity, or just inconsistent.  Pleasence is sometimes affecting but you get the sense that he’s keeping his aggressive eccentricity in check:  it breaks out – and is too powerful – when Buchanan fulminates against the idleness of Raymond, who is excellently played by Richard O’Callaghan.  As Debbie, Sheila White, like O’Callaghan, is admirably and likeably natural.  Hermione Baddeley is touchingly woebegone as Edith.

It was a treat for me that the BFI screening of The Good and Faithful Servant was introduced by Patricia Routledge, in conversation with one of the senior BFI curators:  she was up in London to be interviewed for a new BBC documentary about Joe Orton, due to be shown towards the end of this year.   She talked about Orton’s attendance at the read-through and rehearsals, describing her apprehension about meeting him (she thought he loathed not just Mrs Vealfoy but women generally) and her relief that he turned out to be courteous and constructive in his comments on the production.  Asked if she’d done any further Orton, Routledge said no – she’d been offered Entertaining Mr Sloane (Orton’s diaries suggest this must have been the television version in 1968) but turned it down:  ‘I hated the play’.   Patricia Routledge is eighty-eight now but altogether vigorous.  She was especially alert to signals that her much younger interviewer was patronising her.  ‘You’re clearly someone with very firm opinions,’ he said blandly at one point.  ‘Not as firm as Mrs Vealfoy’s,’ came the quick reply.

19 August 2017

[1]  In the television production, the ‘redcoat’ references were changed to ‘redband’, presumably to avoid problems with Butlin’s.