Nicholas Wright’s new play directed by Richard Eyre based on Booker Prize shortlisted author Lady Caroline Blackwood’s book of the same name dealing with her attempt to interview a widowed Duchess of Windsor in 1980 has a poetical allusion in its title, accentuated by the Duchess being something of a fantasy figure around whom the ideas of memory and artistic representation revolve.
The impediment to Lady Caroline’s interview is the octogenarian Maitre Suzanne Blum, the Duchess’s lawyer, also a companion cum gaoler. Under Blum’s orders, no one is allowed to see the Duchess; she might be completely senile, she might even be dead. Her jewels are being sold anonymously at auction and the housekeeper is wearing her furs. Denied access to the Duchess, Blackwood re-casts the profile with Blum (only two years younger than the ailing Duchess) as the focus, leading to a battle of wills and egos between two stubborn women, which ultimately comes down to each vowing to outlive the other.
Mrs Simpson herself only appears in a fantasy sequence at the beginning of the play in a youthful guise, the decadent jewellery collecting, ‘vawdka’-addicted socialite of lore. Caroline’s re-imaging of Wallis’s story as a twisted Gothic fairytale is reflected by the way in which it is as if time has stood still in the Windsors’ Bois de Boulogne home, occupied by people who by 1980 are relics and anachronisms. This eighteenth-century salon (designed by Anthony Ward) filled with Ancien Regime objets d’arts is untouched by modernity. The youngest character, Blum’s assistant and an ingratiating collector of influential people Michael Bloch (the excellent John Heffernan), gives the impression of being born in the wrong era, in a striped jacket that makes him look “like something out of The Boy Friend.”
Sheila Hancock employs a superb French accent and regal mannerisms as the indomitable Suzanne Blum, who, the Simpson connection aside, had a remarkable career, being the daughter of a Jewish butcher (the Windsors’ cosying-up to Hitler isn’t mentioned) who qualified as a lawyer in the 1920s. A model of professional discretion only offering sycophantic anecdotes (the Duke and Duchess were apparently renowned for their charity – the Duke would open doors for unimportant people) and adamantly against using her client’s celebrity for self-promotion, she is won over by the glittering prospect of being photographed by Lord Snowdon. Her sparring with Anna Chancellor’s dishevelled, vodka-fuelled journalist (immortalised by her husbands Lucian Freud and Robert Lowell in art and poetry) is splendidly done; it seems quite plausible that she has the willpower to live forever.
I couldn’t help but be rather unsettled by Diana Mosley (a relation of Lady Caroline by marriage and the author of a cut-and-paste biography of the Duchess) and her repellent political views being treated as a comedy turn like a favourite eccentric aunt, receiving gales of delighted laughter (somehow the dialogue automatically becomes funnier when delivered by a Mitford sister). Angela Thorne’s portrayal of Lady Mosley’s breezy anti-Semitism is all too convincing with impressively arched vowels, but the idea of a Nazi that the nation took to its bosom is a deeply troubling one, which strikes me as the real demon in the story, though probably not Wright’s intention.
Wright touches upon the plight of being widowed at any age, the fear of being kept alive like a “breathing cabbage” and journalistic ethics with delicacy but doesn’t explore them to fruition. It’s a play that has the rather smug surface gloss of a beautifully photographed high society magazine, one that is lovely to look at, finely acted and pithily written, but has more to do with namedropping in gilded exile than offering a huge amount of insight.
Written for Exeunt
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