The French Lieutenant's Woman

How on earth to you stage John Fowles’ complex, post-modern 1969 The French Lieutenant’s Woman? Being Brighton Little Theatre for one thing, with consummate director Claire Lewis and movement director Graham Brown blocking the seamless transitions of 18 actors multi-roling on a tiny stage, lightly porting the only props: six chairs in a fluid ballet.

Playing till July 31st it rightly transfers to the Minack from August 5th-8th in case you’re in the area: where real waves will accompany the performance. No need there for the briefly-projected, evocative video on Michael Folkard’s set of Lyme-like cliffs: simple off-white folds with tucked exits, reverberating to Richard Lindfield’s sound and played on by Beverley Grover’s spectrum of colours. Engrossing costumes led by Barbara Campbell’s team evoke a mid-19th century, sharp and clean as the new chemical colour mauve.

Forget the film. Adapted by Mark Healy and first performed in the USA in 2003, this goes straight to the book, faithfully reproduces authorial intervention, strips back to its original dialogue.

BLT though have added a new dimension. Composer/arranger Michael James brings original music to this production, coached by Ciru James who as Miss Jemima Sullivan leads others – and whose wonderful solo is almost blocked by a few flailing arms. Occasionally as in the terrific London bordello scene I wondered if the fine music fitted, slightly oblique to the mood; but that’s a cavil. It’s mostly haunting, haunted, surprising.

Writer (Duncan Henderson) is onstage almost throughout, stopping, interrogating, being contradicted, thwarted or occasionally stamping authority; trying on different voices to slip into the narrative as wise Dr Grogan.

Henderson is a superb anchor: as baffled author with a Dorset burr or Scottish medic graunching his vowels, his gift of portraying flawed entitlement compromises the Writer’s critique of his hero exuding its embodiment. Ranging across and melting into the action, emerging to wag a wise alter-ego finger at his hero, Henderson never ironises his double identity. He exhales resignation instead.

It’s 1867. Aristocratic but penurious paleontologist Charles Smithson (Lewis Todhunter) is engaged to local heiress-in-waiting Ernestina Freeman (Melissa Paris). But chipping away at fossils and doubt he encounters mysterious, even more penurious and possibly ‘fallen’ Sarah Woodruff (Amelia Thurley), the ‘educated-above-her-station’ farmer’s daughter; who gives the book its title. You’ll know the plot, but there’s fresh twists.

Actors swirl around the fatal duo; one recalls the magical chemistry between Todhunter and Paris in Shakespeare in Love and their performances elsewhere.  Here Paris has to play clever but innocent and finally outraged ‘Tina’. The final scene between her and Todhunter is electrifying. Paris is superb at calibrating disbelief, pleading five stages of grieving and outrage in a few moments.

Todhunter bestrides everything he does and his hauteur towards servant Sam Farrow (Michael Grant, also London swell Tom and previously Marlowe to Todhunter’s Will) is chilling. Grant too deeply impresses as Sam in a range of subservient modes, finally one of savage dismissal; and there’s a touch of Marlowe in his roisterer Tom.

Todhunter also brings out Charles’ warmth, his essential humanity and conflicted desires – chemistry between him and Thurley starts delicately but turns (like the book) sexually urgent, even brutal. What Todhunter also breaks through to is Charles’ panicky moments, his abruptness under a genteel carapace. His exchanges with Henderson show deeper urbanity than his London carousels, lusty with release and hypocrisy.

Thurley’s debut at BLT (she’s played memorably at NVT and elsewhere) is calculatedly slow-burn. Her presence as Sarah bores into you, though her deliberately one-dimensional aloofness is a mask; one that bursts to vehemence and fraught passion. Thurley’s entreaties, passion and riddling rejection, rings out in startling reveals. As does the final rejection of vicious employer Mrs Poulteney (Patti Griffiths, also deliciously entertainer Mrs Elliott) where Thurley can flay a black-ice Griffiths, so virtuous Charles images her flailing into hell.

Many regulars make up the cast. Friendly Miss Davis (Amy Brangwyn, recently Sarah Siddons in Kemble’s Riot). Chantelle Winder riffles a fan of accents from Sam’s Lyme fiancée Mary, as well as an American Girl and London Charlotte; vicar Mr Forsythe (the magnificent John Tolputt in a small role); kindly employer of Sarah Mrs Tranter (a quietly radiant Nikki Dunsford); and Annie (Maya Kihara, flourishing in London).

Helen Schlüter plays a gallimaufry of roles from Mrs Endicott, ambitious American Mother, Bessie and Poultney’s spy-and-tattle housekeeper Mrs Fairey. Detective 1 and Guard are taken by Mike Skinner, Detective 2 by Paul Charlton, also stage manager, Girl and put-upon maid, Sarah’s almost-confidante Millie (Sarah Conway). Charles’ airily urbane lawyer Nathaniel Montague and Detective 3 are taken by Edd Berridge.

James also leads Berridge, Knight, Kihara, Skinner, Winder, Conway in their vocal and instrumental ensemble, along with Ma Terpsichore (Frankie Knight, living up to her role as Dance Captain).

This production is superlatively ambitious, mostly flawless. Conceptually it’s tricky to project such layers as author and cast without appearing clunky, and Lewis and Brown spectacularly succeed here. That’s even before the little matter of stagecraft.

But this is BLT. How they manage it might stupefy a newcomer. James’ wonderful music (how many such productions can conjure fresh composition?) owns an elegiac lightness. Grover’s atmospheric lighting, suffusing colours rather than gulphs of dark and spotlighting, will come into its own at the Minack.

We’re getting almost blandly used to outstanding productions. The French Lieutenant’s Woman stretches new boundaries like last year’s showstopper Shakespeare in Love. Like that show, this deserves preservation. A must-see.

Published July 28, 2024 by Simon Jenner

Brighton Little Theatre’s reputation goes from strength to strength and this dramatisation of the John Fowles novel of the same name goes a long way to securing that. It’s a complex enough novel to start with, and one that has so much resonance for anyone who is a creative writer. On the page the layered complexities of plot and thought are difficult enough for the reader. So how does a playwright set about staging the novel in a way that deals with the twists and turns the story and the creator of the story within the novel go about this. The film, good as it was, did not offer the satisfaction of the book for sure so it was with trepidation that I sat down and waited for a staged version to unfold.

And unfold it did in the most illuminating fashion. The writer is ever present, pondering plot and character. The characters emerge and reveal their roles gradually and graphically against a pale abstract set that serves as every location. Two stacks of black chairs take on the integral device of furnishing those locations throughout and the large cast are charged with lifting and shifting them from space to space and purpose to purpose. It’s an elegant device that deserves the name chaireography. Director Claire Lewis has beautifully and elegantly crafted the way the play is structured and presented in such a small space. It could easily have been cluttered and clumsy but it works incredibly well.

Her skills are also apparent in the way the cast reveal their roles, most members of the company have to take on multiple parts, from bitter widows to brazen hussies and all points between for the women, and servants to toffs for the men, and I don’t think I have ever seen a better costumed production, stylish, lavish and for the most part using a very clear and clean palette of colours.

The addition of music, some sung live, adds to the richness of the evening and including a very funny musical number in the house of ill repute adds a moment of humorous relief to the darkness of the tale.

This is of course a story within a story. On one level we have the author, fighting to create and discovering that his creations will take on a life of their own, try doing it, this really happens! And then the story within of Sarah Woodruff, a mysterious creature whose choices and actions lead everyone down a very dark path indeed.

The cast is marvellous and flawlessly deliver the, at times, dense text. Duncan Henderson is utterly convincing as the troubled writer and Grogan. Amelia Thurley is gloweringly dark as Sara Woodruff and Lewis Todhunter marvellous as suitor Charles Smithson in his fall from elegant and arrogant sophistication to desperation and disgrace. Patti Griffiths makes an excellent bitter and religiously twisted Mrs Poulteney, staring blankly into the dark as she delivers her barbed comments.

Was John Fowles guilty of misogyny one has to ask, the females in the story have few saving graces, but then neither do the men. It’s the story of human failings, damaged relationships and the contrast between love and lust in which obsession plays so strong a part.

This is proper theatre, done with style and with conviction. I was gripped from start to finish by the quality of both cast and direction, the way the heart of the book was preserved and presented in Mark Healy’s well crafted script. Michael James’s music is hauntingly good and Michael Folkards’s layered set works well and Beverley Grover’s lighting is good but at times suffers as all small spaces do when trying to achieve real darkness and isolated pools of light. That aside this is first class stuff and is deservingly selling out.

Andrew Kay 27 July