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Invitation to the dance
Michael Caines on an old-fashioned West End revival
%231%23.jpg) Large Fry: behind Madame Desmortes (Angela Thorne) in her wheelchair are, left to right, Hugo (J. J. Feild), Romainville (John Ramm), and Capulat (Joanna David) in a scene from Ring Round the Moon © TRISTRAM KENTON |
| THERE is dancing at the heart of Ring Round the Moon, Christopher Fry’s hardy adaptation of L’invitation au château by Jean Anouilh. But this is dancing that nobody understands fully, and its participants sometimes hardly know they are taking part. The audience has an oblique view, permitted to glimpse the working out of the steps, teased with intimations of the world offstage: a ballroom, a park, rooms with views, distant industry that supports this marvellous elegance.
This is a more literal description of the play than it might at first appear. Crucial to the action is a young woman, Isabelle, a professional dancer hired by a young man, Hugo, who might have stepped out of a short story by Saki just for the occasion. Her task is to entrance the assembled aristocrats at a country-house ball, and in particular to bewitch Hugo’s twin brother, Frederic, who is in danger of marrying Diana, a poor little rich girl incapable of returning his love. As it happens, she has reserved her own passion for the seemingly heartless Hugo.
Hugo rather admires his own talent for amorous choreography. But the dance is not so easily controlled. For one thing, Isabelle’s embarrassingly garrulous mother inconveniently comes along, and turns out to know very well Capulat, the companion of the twins’ mother — the waspish and wheelchair-bound Madame Desmortes, who is only too pleased to set in motion her own contredanse.
Christopher Fry’s reputation was at its height in 1950, when Ring Round the Moon was first performed at the Globe Theatre, directed by Peter Brook, and starring Paul Scofield as Hugo and Frederic. (Scofield had been the second actor to play Tegeus in Fry’s shorter, smarter comedy of 1946, A Phoenix Too Frequent.) It counts as one of the three plays of his that ran simultaneously in the West End at that time, a celebrated indication of his popularity.
Sean Mathias’s production at the Playhouse makes the virtues of his writing happily obvious: its wit is sometimes funny (as much self-conscious wittiness, odd though it may sound, is not), and its characters are well-spoken and yet not monotonous. Matthias’s revival is a reminder that these are rewarding roles for actors.
Madame Desmortes’s aperçus remain sharp, her character both strong and sympathetic. Angela Thorne plays her beautifully, whether dismissing Capulat (Joanna David) as being too insipid a personality to have ever been 20, or bitterly considering the limitations of her own old age. There are funny, touching performances here from John Ramm as Hugo’s hapless accomplice Romainville, Andrew Havill as the equally Hugo-baffled Patrice, and Belinda Lang as Isabelle’s gabbling mother.
But Mathias and company often seem not to know what to do with the action of the play — or, rather, the lack of it. The ball takes place offstage; the shape of the evening is compressed and reported; crises and moments of assertion, especially Hugo’s, are too often indicated by a lot of rude pointing. When the action does finally come on stage — with the physical confrontations between, first, Isabelle and Diana, and then Isabelle and Diana’s father, Messerschmann — it seems more prepared in theory than practice, more like the rigidly necessary next step in a dance than a spontaneous, joyous efflorescence.
Yet the escape from a rigid system is partly what the play is about. Hugo claims to do what he does because his brother seems doomed to the pain of unrequited love and a rich but empty marriage. But Hugo can change things: his manipulations can elicit predictable responses. Isabelle can star in his “comedy”, as it is carefully termed, and be paid well for it.
Beneath this particular moon, however, not every rationalised quid produces a concomitant quo. Hugo runs out of ideas. Messerschmann cannot understand why the lowly Isabelle should refuse to take his money for leaving the ball early, so as to please his spoilt daughter; what follows is meant as a shocking overturning of the self-ensnaring rules by which he has lived his life. It doesn’t ring true, and fails to shock.
As both the lovelorn, gentle Frederic, of whom we see relatively little, and the demonic, would-be puppet-master Hugo, J. J. Feild faces a real challenge. The latter character revels in the complexity of the dance and the ease with which he presumes he will control the dancers. Feild plays some of this self-delighted plotting very well, with energy and charisma, but gabbles away a lot, too.
As it happens, the play itself loses its way, as does Mathias’s direction. (The music by Jason Carr is weirdly off-track throughout, and Colin Richmond’s elegant costumes consistently on it.) It can’t help seeming old-fashioned, set, as it is, in a world of rich cynics who can be difficult to care about, with no shortage of farcical exits and entrances (not least for the actor who plays the twins). Naturally enough, the family butler Joshua (Peter Eyre) is on hand to provide suave yet servile re-sponses to all who complain to (or at) him.
This aside, Ring Round the Moon is often both amusing and moving. Joanna David (Capulat) and Be-linda Lang (Isabelle’s mother)
make a delightful double act. As Messerschmann, the Midas-rich (and Midas-cursed) “wicked old Jew” who tries to buy off Isabelle, Leigh Lawson slouches grimly around the play, waiting for his chance to strike. Joshua listens dutifully to his views on Samson “the Israelite”, eyeless at Gaza yet true-sighted at last.
Emily Bruni is very funny as Messerschmann’s dottily rebellious mistress, who sinks rhapsodically to the ground at the thought of romantic poverty instead of boring wealth. And as for Isabelle: Fiona Button nicely captures her decency, and the shame she suffers that Hugo cannot.
At the Playhouse Theatre, Northumberland Avenue, London WC2, for a limited season. Box office: phone 0870 060 6631.
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