Writer: Orlando Figes
Director: Philip Wilson
Orlando Figes’ debut drama, The Oyster Problem, focuses on the friendships of Gustav Flaubert in the latter part of his life. For dramatic purposes, the famously reclusive writer needs to be seen in company. Thus the play opens with a lively dinner party at which Turgenev, Zola and George Sand are guests. Subsequent scenes are mostly similar gatherings of these old friends. The dialogue starts off as pacy and full of fun and the characters are initially well delineated.
Bob Barrett plays the larger-than-life Flaubert with charm and gusto. Peter Hannah is a nervy, cynical Zola, and Giles Taylor makes an urbane and stylish Turgenev. The only woman guest is George Sand, strongly captured by Norma Atallah. Rosalind Lailey doubles as Flaubert’s maid and later his patient niece, Caroline – a rather thankless part. The sets by Isabella van Braeckel are delightful, with beautiful views from windows both in Paris and later in Croisset, Flaubert’s Rouen home.
The menfolk talk a lot about the pleasures of wine and venery – slightly surprising they’d do so in front of a woman, but we’ll let that pass. Dramatic tension comes from the growing evidence that Flaubert is ignoring a looming financial problem. He’s never had to work for a living, but he’s never again enjoyed the success of his first novel, Madame Bovary. Caroline, who lives with her uncle, is forced to urge financial restraint: they can no longer afford oysters and champagne. Flaubert loses all his boyish merriment when confronted with reality, flying into rages about not being able to do what he likes.
The dialogue ensures we are up to speed with the cultural scene in France in the mid-to late 1870s. And it is speed that Figes finds particularly interesting. He has written elsewhere about the effect on literature of the introduction of train travel and the play is peppered with train references and rather good sound effects. But there are strange omissions. Figes makes hardly any reference to the political situation of the period about which he is writing. More significantly, he strips out entirely Flaubert’s great novel of the 1869, Sentimental Education, a brilliant satire on contemporary society and, in particular, the growing commercialisation of art. This means that Flaubert’s known animus towards bourgeois society can only be articulated in the play through his repetitive impotent rants on the subject.
The Oyster Problem loses its way in the second half, in which dramatic tension gives way to lengthy periods of exposition. We can probably predict that the play will end with Flaubert’s death, so there are few surprises as the ailing writer declines. The fundamental issue is that Figes obviously cares passionately about his literary heroes and clearly knows a great deal about them.
He admits candidly in the programme that he lacks confidence making things up – it’s why he has avoided writing a novel. The trouble here is that he has garnered so many fascinating things from his characters’ letters that he can’t resist putting in much much more than is necessary. The characters increasingly lose their individuality and all start to sound the same. And basically everyone is nice. The Oyster Problem nudges up to two and a half hours, a long running time for a play that is very talky in the first place.
Runs until 4 March 2023
