Writer: Jerome Kilty
Director: Stella Powell-Jones
First seen in 1957, Jerome Kilty’s epistolary two-hander Dear Liar covers four decades in the on-off platonic love affair between George Bernard Shaw and the now largely forgotten actor Mrs Patrick Campbell. A staple of the regional playhouse canon in the 1980s and 90s, the play now resides firmly in the dusty hatbox labelled ‘justifiably forgotten theatrical gem’.
Director Stella Powell-Jones delivers a meat-and-potatoes outing for the work in this Jermyn Street Theatre revival, aided by decent performances and solid chemistry from Rachel Pickup as the theatrical grande dame and Alan Turkington as the tetchy, self-regarding Shaw. Yet though packed to the rafters with Shavian badinage, your tolerance for the aged piece, which involves characters reading and speaking their letters to one another while confiding breathlessly to the audience, may lie in direct proportion to your interest in theatrical history or indeed in Shaw himself.
Drawn directly from the voluminous real-life correspondence between the two, fortuitously rescued from Campbell’s Paris deathbed just days before the Germans took the city in 1940, Dear Liar covers the creation of Pygmalion, the horrors of World War I and its aftermath, and the waxing and waning of the duo’s emotional, intellectual, and professional lives and relationships.
The first half comedy-of-manners sees a married Shaw become infatuated with Campbell’s wit, beauty, and extraordinary stage presence. “Is it dignified, is it sensible?” he ponders of his increasingly loved-up state of mind. Given that the couple almost certainly never consummated their relationship, one tends to give Shaw the benefit of the doubt. Campbell, for her part, admires the man’s genius, though she bristles at his petty jealousies, self-satisfied peevishness and overweening egotism: “All I ask is to have my own way in absolutely everything”, he tells us, by way of telegraphing that there are fireworks to come. Inevitably, the witty artistic bubble within which the two reside is destined to be threatened, not least when Shaw, uninvited, follows his enamorata to a weekend away at a seaside resort. “Solitude is wonderful, but not when you’re alone”, he tells her. She is having none of it.
More fireworks arrive in rehearsals for Pygmalion. Shaw writes the part of teenage flower-girl Eliza expressly for Campbell, an expression of considerable faith in his muse’s acting ability, given that the actor is 49 years old when the play opens. She wants to play against a “£20 Higgins” who will not overshadow her performance; he wants an altogether more heroic one. The best of the meagre laughs in the play come as Pickups’ Campbell struggles to master stage cockney, most memorably in the infamous “Not bloody likely!” line that shocked a generation of prudish London theatre-goers. Dick Van Dyke’s grotesque mockney in Mary Poppins is a masterclass in linguistic virtuosity in comparison.
The much more satisfying second half turns darker as the First World War intrudes. Shaw’s intellectual pacifism hits a brick wall in Campbell’s grief over the loss of her son, events that provide some welcome emotional grit to a piece that sometimes struggles to feel like fleshed-out drama. Campbell’s career spirals as Shaw’s career takes ever greater flight. “Clouds have two sides to them”, one of the characters says: on his side is sunny success, on hers slow decline. Tom Paris’s set, sepia clouds stippled onto translucent curtains, brings a suitably ethereal tone to passing years.
Late on Campbell, though determined to “act like a gentleman”, wants to publish Shaw’s letters to her to make some much-needed cash. Fastidious about his reputation, he objects, though he is happy enough to pen a barely concealed account of their relationship in play form. Months, sometimes years, go by without correspondence; when it finally comes, it is often laden with anger.
Powell-Jones’s direction finds sympathy with both characters, though in the end one feels more for Campbell, who ends her days poverty-stricken and alone, than for Turkington’s finicky, declaiming Shaw. Ultimately, Dear Liar struggles to fully satisfy as either a love story or a bioplay, leaving the piece to rely on the wit and verbal dexterity of the source material for effect. The language of the letters is often affecting and beautiful, but the drama struggles to emerge. We are “lustless Lions at play”, she tells him, which more or less sums this up.
Runs until 7 March 2025
