Writers: Shaun McKenna and Lin Coghlan, based on the novels by John Galsworthy
Director: Josh Roche
Over the course of his writing career, novelist and playwright John Galsworthy wrote three trilogies of novels and a sporadic series of short story interludes about the sprawling Victorian family, the Forsytes, and their descendants. Charting their lives through the late nineteenth and into the early to mid-twentieth century, the umbrella term of “The Forsyte Saga” is sometimes applied just to the first three novels in the sequence and sometimes to the entire chronicle.
With so much material to choose from, adapters Shaun McKenna and Lin Coghlan – no strangers to Galsworthy’s saga, having adapted the novels for Radio 4 in 2016 – have chosen to concentrate on a central core of the first two trilogies: Soames Forsyte (Joseph Millson), his first wife Irene (Fiona Hampton), and the daughter from his second marriage, Flora Spencer-Longhurst’s Fleur.
It is through the eyes and experiences of these two women that we see the family, frequently described as obsessed with money and ownership. Presented as a duet of interconnected plays, Part 1: Irene revolves around Irene’s unhappy marriage to Soames, a man who is so deeply ingrained in Victorian mores that he believes his wife is part of his property portfolio. As she finds her head turned by the penniless architect Philip Bossiney (Andy Rush) – engaged to June Forsyte, from a wing of the family already plagued by scandal – Irene’s struggle to escape her loveless marriage becomes physical as well as emotional.
Our guide through Part 1 is Fleur, part narrator and part audience, as she explores what she knows and doesn’t know about her father’s past. Spencer-Longhurst cuts a wry, occasionally arch figure as she wanders through a family bedecked in Anna Yates’s sumptuous Victorian costume designs, looking out of place, but always at home, in her 1920s fashions.
The sumptuous nature of the Forsytes’ lifestyle is expressed in the simplest of stagings: a red carpet and a matching velvet curtain enveloping the Park’s back wall. Occasionally, the curtain is pulled back, revealing one of the theatre’s steel pillars to represent an oak tree. But mostly, the surroundings are expressed only through character, enhanced by Alex Musgrave’s subtly changing lighting.
Hampton’s Irene is a study in Victorian unhappiness, a woman bound by duty even as she seeks an escape from her torment. Glimpses of happiness – for example, her joy around Florence Roberts’s June, a rebellious and forthright young woman, at least until her fiancé falls in love with Irene – throw the pain around her husband into sharp relief.
Lest this sound especially heavy-going – which, at times, it could be, especially when Soames seeks to “reassert his marital rights” by raping his wife – Mckenna and Coghlan discover rivers of humour throughout. From the Pickwick-like spirit of the avuncular Uncle Swithin (Michael Lumsden) to the black humour Millson finds in Soames’s incomprehension at the world, Galsworthy’s dialogue sparkles in their interpretation of it.
Act I of Irene tells us the story of the first Forsyte novel, The Man of Property. Its second act continues the tale of Irene in exile and the “great family rift” as Soames’s uncle Old Jolyon (Lumsden) befriends the estranged woman. Millson continues his complex, multi-layered portrayal of a man who cannot comprehend that what he did to his wife was wrong and thus seeks no redemption for it. Despite his behaviour, Millson’s Soames is not an unlikeable character, proving himself to be more complex than the initial painting of him may suggest.
Fleur’s attitude as narrator also contributes to that. If Part 1 is her exploring her roots – “these people aren’t just names in family scrapbooks, they’re the soil I grew in” – it is also her attempt to reconcile the father she loves with the dark secret that caused the rift. At the end of the first play, we discover the cause for her quest for knowledge; while she is the product of Soames’s second marriage, she is interested in Irene’s son – who, by her remarriage to Jolyon’s son (and June’s father), is also a Forsyte, even though he and Fleur share no genetic heritage.
So, while Part 1 elucidates the reason for the rift, Part 2: Fleur, is about its effects. As time moves on, the first play’s younger characters become the family’s older generation. Fleur herself regresses from being the older narrator we first met to a more junior version of the character. Teenaged Fleur is besotted with her cousin Jon, and her determination to secure him betrays that she, too, like her antecedents, has come to regard the affection of others as a form of property.
What initially feels like a much inferior second play is enlivened both by Spencer-Longhurst’s forceful personality as Fleur and the introduction of Jamie Wilkes as her potential suitor, Michael Mont. Wilkes’s Michael is a bumbling, well-meaning sort more akin to Jerome K Jerome than Galsworthy, but the contrast between him and Andy Rush’s Jon illuminates the melodrama.
As the action progresses through the 1920s, Irene only makes brief appearances, although her antipathy towards Soames and the secrecy behind the real reason for their split provides the glue that binds the two plays together. Other connections abound, subtly expressed. Michael’s assertion that husbands have no freehold ownership over their wives – expressed to Soames, no less – signifies both a wider societal shift and the older Forsyte’s growing sense of detachment from a world that is changing beneath him.
And while the second play of this diptych initially seems slighter than the first, the closing elements of Fleur retain as much emotional heft as anything that has gone before. It offers as satisfying a conclusion as could be hoped for from two plays that offer a distillation of such a sprawling epic. Either one of Mckenna and Coghlan’s plays would make for a satisfying evening of theatre; taken together, they are nothing short of a triumph.
Continues until 7 December 2024
