The poetry of love
TOM AND VIV
Almeida
TOM is TS Eliot the austere Anglicised American poet and playwright and Viv was Vivienne Haigh-Wood, who had properties in London and Ireland. The history of the 16-year marriage and Viv’s descent into periodic madness is told in quick episodes with humour, but often painful effect.
Viv’s family are held together by her mother Rose who feels that Viv’s manic spells are controllable and does not need the stigma of the lunatic asylum. Anna Carteret is the matrix and matron fighting to preserve her Edwardian value systems. It is a finely stated performance.
Viv’s brother Morris is more or less the symbol of the family’s social arrest, amiable but never reaching the A-list. Robert Portal manages to capture in spite of his genial oafishness a tenderness and nervous humanity. He actually died in the Surrey stockbroker belt.
Tom rises effortlessly from a bank official in a foreign trading department to the board of the publishers at Faber and Faber. A professorship in poetry in Harvard, he even picked up the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. Outwardly a distant man carried away by High Church theology, he flirted with Fascism and paradoxically loved joke shops and whoopee cushions. He turns out to be a right-winger who was taught at Oxford by Bertrand Russell, the philandering philosopher who actually flirted with Viv.
Will Ken succeeds as Eliot, a man often passionate but clinically frigid in his own self-certainty. The decision to keep Viv sectioned makes the scene between them very harrowing. King George V’s own physician diagnosed her as suffering from moral insanity. Such women were lobotomised, a horrific operation on a part of the brain. Francis O’Connor moves from child-like shopping monster to a knife-carrying helpless neurotic.
Lyrical in poetry and a harsh realist, she became ultimately resigned to nine years incarceration in Northumberland House asylum where she died.
O’Connor like the others is completely believable not only as a disturbing case in history but a woman who suffered alone.
Author Michael Hastyings has got it just right and he was well acquitted by the ensemble under Lindsay Posner’s direction. I note that Jamie Arkell the consultant psychiatrist at the Royal Free Hospital is thanked for his help.
020 7359 4404
Until Nov 4
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