Well—you wont die laughing

The rather sad thing about The Killing of Sister George which is currently showing at Downstage is that it reads far better than it acts. For some reason it was named the best play of the year in London in 1965 though I cannot see why. This personal failure is not the fault of the Downstage production by Dick Johnstone which manages to get laughs from even the feeblest of the feeble jokes that permeate the script. I read the play when it appeared in Esquire some time ago and thought it extremely funny, perhaps all those feeble jokes look better on paper than they sound on the stage. I saw a dismal production of it by John Kim for the now defunct Christchurch professional theatre and, because I had thought the play so funny on one reading, blamed the producer for not bringing it alive on stage, Now having seen the Wellington production I have begun to feel that my original assessment of the play was wrong. Somehow, somewhere along the line, the play misses out. Perhaps it tries to do too many things (kitchen sink, satire, searing insight into lesbianism) perhaps, and more likely, it is overwritten.

As everyone probably knows the play is about a lesbian (June Buckridge) who plays the part of Sister George the district nurse in a BBC programme rather reminiscent of The Archers. Unfortunately the programme's popularity ratings are slipping and the BBC decides the only way to win back listeners is to have a major crisis—the death of Sister George. To pacify George they offer her the title role in the Toddler Time feature Clarabell Cow. This half of the play which more or less provides the framework is great fun; there is plenty of satire on the BBC, audience research methods and so forth.

The other half of the play deals with the personality and life of June Buckridge. As already mentioned she is a lesbian, she also has trouble remembering when she is George the character and when she is herself. She is in love with her flatmate Childe and she thinks of herself as a man, she constantly refers to her days in the armed forces, is always ready for a man to man chat, and collects horse brasses while Childe collects dolls. In addition to all this she treats cooking and housework as sissy, drinks gallons of gin and smokes cigars; she is in fact a caricature of the butch lesbian. This is a major fault of the play—she is too much a caricature and not enough a character in her own right. Everything she does is so extreme that it scarcely seems credible, she is allowed one moment of tenderness and this is a recounting of the past when she first fell in love with Childe. Although this scene is very effective it does not make caricature character—George is flawed admittedly but she is hardly credible.

Paralleling the collapse of George's (she is rarely referred to as June) career is the collapse of her love affair with Childe. The abominations George metes out eventually become too much and Childe agrees to go and live with Mrs Mercy one of the BBC officials. Somewhere along the line one ought to feel a tremendous sympathy for George but apart from the brief scene mentioned above there is none. At the end when George is alone with no job and no lover there should be tremendous compassion for her but because she is so difficult to grasp as a person there is nothing but a relief that Childe has got away from her.

Where Frank Marcus has failed to create a successful picture of a butch lesbian he has succeeded in his portrait the passive Childe. Childe is a girl woman, she is 34, she had an illegitimate child at 18, she is now desperately lonely stuck with George who she once loved and now fears and she has built for herself a fantasy world of dolls on whom she lavishes the care and attention she neglected to place on her own child. At the same time Childe wants to live in a real world, she wants to be a polite hostess at tea parties, she wants to do the right things, but she is constantly thwarted by George. At the play's end she leaves George for a certainly more genial life and she goes to live with a character far more credible than George is ever likely to be.

Mrs Mercy as played by Majorie Brooke-White is not really noticeable in the first two acts, she appears, looks right, makes a sufficient prop for George to hang a few of her tirades on, and sows the seeds for Childe's later departure. In the third act she appears to help console George on the day of her radio funeral. George throws a major tantrum and storms off to have a bath. Mrs Mercy is left with Childe and their brief scene together is one of the best in the play and is of considerable credit to both actresses. Childe unloads all her burdens and Mrs Mercy guides her towards a decision to leave George, perhaps this is for her own devious ends but this thought does not interfere with the tenderness evoked.

Cecily Polson as Childe is in a difficult position, a young actress she has to play a 34 year old woman who acts and thinks as if she is 17, but Miss Polson acquits herself with skill and obvious sincerity giving an intelligent interpretation of a demanding role.

Pat Evison is an actress whose professionalism I admire considerably, her ability to hold an audience's attention and to gain their sympathy is unquestioned but unfortunately the limitations of caricature that the author has placed on George do not permit her to rise above the excesses of the script. She does however give a performance that commands the audience's attention even if it does not appear as a particularly valid interpretation of a lesbian. In one scene, when recounting how she first became infatuated with Childe, she does offer another side of George very effectively but the author only gives her this single chance and the play suffers accordingly.

I think producer Dick Johnstone by concentrating on the satire of the first two acts and leaving the pathos to he drawn out by Majorie Brooke-White and Cecily Polson in the third act has been trapped by the failings of the script. The set by Raymond Boyce is one of the most impressive seen at Downstage this year and conveys the two worlds of Childe and George, one of dolls the other of horse brasses. It is a pity the set is so large, perhaps too large for the size of the theatre.

Despite all that I have said here and the nature of Other reviews of the play I believe it is worth seeing and I believe it is a play and production worthy of considerable discussion.

—Bob Lord.