TV review

  • The Hotel in Amsterdam (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Anthony Page (1971)

    John Osborne’s The Hotel in Amsterdam was first staged at the Royal Court in 1968 before transferring to the West End, where it enjoyed a commercially successful run into 1969.  It was well received by plenty of critics too and named Best Play of the year in the Evening Standard awards.   The play’s success was no doubt helped by the presence in the cast of Paul Scofield, then at the height of his public popularity after the film of A Man for All Seasons (1966).  Although The Hotel in Amsterdam wasn’t revived on the London stage until 2003 (at the Donmar Warehouse), the play was adapted by Osborne for television and broadcast in 1971 in ITV’s Sunday Night Theatre slot.  BFI screened the ATV production this month as part of the AHRC-funded ‘Forgotten Television Drama’ project based at Royal Holloway.

    The piece concerns six friends – three married couples – on a midwinter weekend in Amsterdam, a refuge from life in London and the tyrannical film producer, referred to throughout as ‘KL’, with whom they’re all directly or indirectly connected.  Paul Scofield, who was keen for there to be a filmed record of his performance, recreates the role of the writer Laurie, whose line of work and vitriolic volubility immediately suggest a self-portrait of John Osborne.  In his excellent biography of Osborne, A Patriot for Us (2006), John Heilpern confirms this – and that KL is inspired by Tony Richardson, Osborne’s long-time collaborator who, by the late 1960s, had turned into of his greatest bêtes noires.  The other visitors to Amsterdam are Laurie’s second wife Margaret (Isabel Dean); his best friend Gus (Michael Craig), who also works in the film industry, and Gus’s wife Annie (Jill Bennett); KL’s secretary Amy (Susan Engel) and her artist husband Dan (David Burke).  John Heilpern rates The Hotel in Amsterdam highly, describing it as:

    ‘… a chamber piece about love and friendship, betrayal and loss.  Beneath the gauze of its cauterized, escapist surface is the undertow of melancholy and need that seeps through all of Osborne’s plays.  It’s about growing older and the sting of the Bitch Goddess of success.’

    This is right enough though John Osborne is selective in his distribution of the melancholy and need, and of the good lines:  the lion’s share of all three commodities goes to his alter ego Laurie and what remains to Annie, a role written for Osborne’s then wife Jill Bennett, although she hadn’t been available to play it on stage.  (Bennett was appearing at the time in another of her husband’s plays, Time Present.)   For most of the seventy-five minutes of the TV adaptation, The Hotel in Amsterdam comprises alcohol-fuelled bitchy gossiping and little in the way of plot – although there’s a potent sense of desperation in the characters’ making the most of their brief escape, of rising gloom at the prospect of what they must return to on Monday morning.  Osborne’s getting things to happen is forced.  The weekend is meant to be a secret then Margaret admits that she let her sister Gillian, who’s going through a bad time and might need to get in touch, in on it.  As the others are preparing to go out for dinner on the Sunday evening, Gillian (Gillian Martell) arrives – in order to break up the established order of the play.  The unexpected interruption and change of mood in effect provide the opportunity for Laurie and Annie to admit their unspoken love for each other.  We learn that Gillian told KL about the weekend away in Amsterdam (though it’s not clear what her connection with KL is or why they would be communicating).  The proceedings are brought to a startling ending by a telephone call, in which Amy is informed, by KL’s chauffeur, that the boss has committed suicide.

    Osborne’s fluent nastiness is formidably witty but tends to wipe the smile off your face and rule out the possibility of laughter.  Fortunately, much of the acting in The Hotel in Amsterdam does the reverse.  The mask that Paul Scofield creates is extraordinarily rich:  Laurie’s words and eyes are often saying different things but Scofield also shows a mind constantly at work, working for and assessing reactions to his comic flow, which is both self-assertive and self-protective.  Scofield restores your good humour even though you’re aware it’s the actor’s phenomenal skill that’s the source of your pleasure.  There are moments too when you sense in the laughter on the screen that you’re hearing the other members of the cast loving what Scofield is doing rather than their characters enjoying what Laurie is saying.  This is especially true of a bit when Laurie recites from memory the contents of a letter received from one of his despised relatives – a virtuoso sarcastic turn.  According to John Heilpern, Laurie’s text is taken almost verbatim from letters written to Osborne by his abhorred mother and other relatives.  Paul Scofield is so brilliantly inventive and individual, however, that he turns Laurie into something more than John Osborne’s principal mouthpiece, into someone nearly tragic.

    Scofield gets excellent support, especially from Jill Bennett.  Annie’s eventual expression of her feelings for Laurie makes perfect sense of Bennett’s earlier playing of her:  we come to understand Annie’s almost exaggerated determination to enjoy herself while in Laurie’s company and the combative edge to her exchanges with him, reflecting Annie’s need to show, in a kind of code, that her communication with Laurie is special.   Isabel Dean is less effective:  she plays cool, sensible Margaret according to how she’s described by others but this isn’t enough to suggest how Margaret ever got married, let alone has stayed married, to the volatile, regularly adulterous Laurie.  As Gus, Michael Craig convinces in just the way Dean doesn’t. Craig’s line readings are nothing special but his warm, easy presence makes it believable that Annie is prepared, even if she’s not content, to spend her life with the perhaps bisexual, affably acquiescent Gus.  It’s important to the already nostalgic John Osborne (who wasn’t yet forty when he wrote the play) that Amy and Dan are a generation younger than the others: they’re mutually satisfied in their physical relationship, as well as less cynical.  They’re also outliers in that Amy tends to like people and Dan seems untroubled by his working-class background.  Susan Engel exudes a practised amiability; David Burke speaks relatively slowly and when Dan makes jokes he’s less aggressively witty than the others.  Neither Amy nor Dan feels the need to compete with their elders.  Both, in their different ways, frustrate and seem to frighten Laurie-Osborne.

    Early on, a few of the camera movements are too blatant, swooping in irrelevantly for a close-up, but things soon settle down.  Anthony Page’s direction is, for the most part, admirably unobtrusive; he achieves an admirable variation of pace in the delivery of Osborne’s abundant words.  The opening shots show the tourists and their luggage heading down a corridor towards their adjacent rooms in the hotel; once they’re inside, they stay there the whole time.   This adaptation is a good example of how a single-set stage play can seem at home on television in a way it rarely does as cinema.  More remarkably, you realise this even watching the piece in a film theatre (NFT3) – rather than on a TV screen of the size for which the production was designed.

    2 February 2017

  • After the Solo (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Moira Armstrong (1975)

    [A bit daft to exhume this note but I wanted to because I remember After the Solo as a TV play which, at the age of nineteen, I especially enjoyed. (Broadcast by the BBC on 25 November 1975, it was, as far as I can see, never repeated.)  The trouble is, forty plus years on, I don’t remember too much else about it – and what I jotted down at the time is hard to decipher now.  The quotes below are the gist of the lines rather than verbatim.  Some of the plot details may be shaky too.]

    After the Solo by John Challen was a Play for Today about an unprepossessing, truculent schoolboy called Ralph Dawson.  He doesn’t get on well with his authoritarian father or quiet, distant mother.  He’s disliked by his classmates and by the staff at his boys-only secondary school.  Ralph’s one talent is his singing voice.  He belongs to a choral society and is chosen by its romantic, thoughtful choirmaster to sing a soprano solo in a performance of Fauré’s Requiem.  He falls out with one of his few friends and nastily hits him with a piece of slate.  Ralph is set upon and humiliated by a gang, as revenge for what he did to the other boy.  He’s frightened by the threat of further rough treatment from them, and that his voice will be damaged as a result.  Ralph receives, instead of weekly pocket money, monthly ‘merit’ money.  The amount is assessed by his father, according to the balance of Ralph’s good and bad deeds in the intervening weeks.  The cash is kept under lock and key but Ralph, in increasing need of danger money, manages to steal from it.  On the night of the performance, when the time for his solo arrives, Ralph at first can’t bring himself to begin but, once the lady mainstay of the choral society leaps in to substitute, he stands up and sings.  He is warmly applauded.  He returns home, knowing that the time has come for him to be rewarded for his singing efforts and for Mr Dawson to discover the theft.  Ralph faces his father but with one eye on the money box.

    This was the best single drama I’ve watched on television this year.  It was refreshing to see a Play for Today that didn’t push beyond the clear limits of its conception to try and make big points – which instead made its points so effectively that they seemed important ones.  The eccentric Welsh choirmaster Peters wasn’t a brilliant conception but Gerald James underplayed him well:  he made us listen to what Peters was saying behind his Celtic emotionality.  He stressed how poignant the solo would be if Ralph sang it.  The whole Fauré work, Peters said, was about transience; the ephemeral nature of a boy’s treble voice would be touchingly appropriate.  This was an essential theme of the play:  Ralph’s voice temporarily transcended his unattractive personality but that voice would soon disappear.  But the boy’s unattractiveness was paradoxically appealing too.  Reticent and with little awareness of other people, Ralph was also free of pretence and slyness – in contrast to his father or his teachers or the bitchy sopranos in the choir (their bitchiness was shown in an obvious and mechanical way: they were given a line apiece to convey it).

    Ralph’s father wasn’t sufficiently developed.  Leonard Rossiter – a clever and amusing actor but not, it seems, a very versatile one – smothered what character there was in the adenoidal fusspot that he created.  Although we could see flickers of pride and love for his son, Mr Dawson criticised Ralph relentlessly even when the latter was trying to be co-operative.  Of his new school blazer:

    Dawson:  Now you won’t grow out of it, will you?

    Ralph: No, I won’t.

    Dawson: No, I won’t, he says! Well, there’s nothing we can do about that – you will grow out of it!

    Mr Dawson knows that his son is there to be upbraided and disciplined without knowing why.  At home, he talks with a sickening, droning overconfidence.  He gloats in the little victories he wins over his strange, distant wife (Geraldine Newman) when they argue about Ralph.  At a PTA meeting, Mr Dawson is a haranguing, humourless pain in the neck – determined to keep talking and criticising his son, clinging leech-like to the headmaster (Barrie Cookson), who avoids Dawson with impatient, almost physical distaste. Leonard Rossiter – with that serpentine quality of speech and physical movement that is his speciality – was too theatrically big for Mr Dawson.  You were always conscious this was a performance, albeit an entertaining one.

    It’s a remark by the father that gives the play its title.  Agreeing to Ralph’s taking the solo, Mr Dawson tells the choirmaster:

    ‘Yes, he’s your responsibility for that.  Then after the solo, after the applause has ended, he’s my responsibility for good.’

    The remark was too neat a summing up (and the meaning of such parental responsibility wasn’t really explored).  Even so, the pivotal importance of Ralph’s solo guaranteed the play a strong and suspenseful climax.  Once he’d sung the solo, the boy would have to admit to his father that he’d stolen money from him; soon enough, his voice would break too and he’d have nothing going for him.  The writer John Challen intelligently restricted himself to pointing up the threats to Ralph of these specific changes, instead of trying to work up a vague loss-of-innocence-end-of-childhood theme.

    What made the play work was newcomer Nicholas Watson’s playing of Ralph.   With his heavy, bulldog face, sullen mien and unremarkable speaking voice, he looked primitive and sounded mechanical – both qualities were strongly expressive of the character.  The poignancy of Watson’s solo was extraordinary, for three reasons.  First, because the purity and clarity of his treble voice transcended Ralph’s dull appearance (this brought to mind R S Thomas’s poem A Blackbird Singing).  Second, because, like the choirmaster, one was aware that the sweet voice was transient (thickset Ralph already seemed to be a young man as much as a boy).  Third, because Ralph himself was unaware of these things – his thoughts were rather on the cash box.

    Moira Armstrong’s direction of the choir’s performance was effective in its restraint.  Elsewhere, the contrast between Ralph’s personality and singing was emphasised too obviously – images of the boy misbehaving were accompanied by the sound of his choir voice on the soundtrack.  I could have done without a shot of Ralph and his friend as small figures in an industrial landscape; this is such a tired device that, by now, it’s hardly a social comment at all, merely a realistic screen drama convention.  The play was much more effective in getting across its failure-to-communicate theme.  The actors often delivered their lines in a way that showed the words meant much more to the person speaking them than to anyone else in earshot.   In contrast, when Ralph sang his solo, what poured out seemed hardly to belong to him at all – it meant more to the adults in the audience than to the boy producing the sounds.  All in all, After the Solo was a strong and moving piece of work.

    [1975]

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