Brighton Year-Round 2023

Little Wars

Brighton Little Theatre

Genre: Dark Comedy, Drama, Historical

Venue: Brighton Little Theatre

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

As Steven Carl McCasland notes in a preface and voiceover to this Brighton Little Theatre production of his 2020 Little Wars, premiered in lockdown with a starry cast, this is horribly prescient: it couldn’t have been foreseen when it was programmed. And it’s a vital play, consummately directed by Joseph Bentley.

McCasland and BLT dedicate these performances to all minorities undergoing racism and anti-Semitism and “innocent civilians suffering, particularly war in their homelands today.”

Steven Adams surpasses himself in a realistic set, the turquoise-green-carpeted and delicately lit (Beverley Grover) book-case-backed set which uses the full depth of BLT, including a recessed side entrance and many pictures. Some hang on the prosc-arch. It’s superbly detailed down to 1940s items including a working wireless (Grover again).

It’s so good we could be at the Donmar, in sets using such rugs (two Peter Gill plays spring to mind); in a real way we are. This links to a Donmar production this January that paradoxically is more plush east-coast than these be-rugged productions. A little way in I realised with a cold thrill that McCasland is writing the prelude to Lilian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine, from 1941; and his style cleaves close to hers. There’s many witty spoilers not to be revealed that link to famous semi-fictive and real events. But teasingly Watch on the Rhine is never mentioned. What McCasland’s play suggests though is someone undergoing a complete peripeteia.

And why not? Expect verbal somersaults. We’re in the drawing room of Gertrude Stein (Tess Gill) and Alice B Toklas (Patti Griffiths) on June 14^th 1940, with their maid Bernadette Marienthal (Esther Dracott) who narrates the opening and epilogue out of time: “I’ll tell you when I’m dead, I tell them.”

Dracott’s debut as the maid with reasons to be fearful couldn’t be more auspicious. Beautifully poised and contained, with feeling crimped back to understated, her story’s the weave and memory of one night when despite Stein’s assurances, Marshal Petain surrenders France to the Nazis. Bernadette’s harrowing personal narrative when after the interval the older drinking women relax into confession, is like Valerie’s show-stealing reveal in Conor McPherson’s The Weir. Only here it’s less dramatic, more pivotal.

Mary Buttinger (Lex Lake) blows in quietly, a psychiatrist on a mission, but not to save minds so much as bodies. Money buys passports, sewn in her hat. Lake too gives a finely modulated reading of subdued urgency and steely resolve, smuggling monies from the couple and others to secure bribes to passports.

The three literary guests aren’t entirely welcome. Stein loathes Lilian Hellman (Suzanne Heritage), her nemesis, because she loves and loathes Hellman’s The Children’s Hour about suppressed lesbian desire and witch-hunts in a girls’ school. Hellmann, “bitch” and hedonist is in Heritage’s hands a languorously drink-swilling foil to her friend, celebrated wit, poet, short-story-writer and aphorist Dorothy Parker (Claire Lewis). Lewis is able to etch her acid remarks with insouciance but warms notably in hidden compassion; and tells a numbed history of her own to approach what’s happened to Bernadette.

It’s Dorothy’s remarks too that give the play its title. “While we hear about the tragedies, it’s the little wars that kill us.” Lewis delivers this in a watchful moment of seriousness, dropping waspishness. These little wars between the women but between everyone, are what kill us. Moments of betrayal and inaction, the kind found in Hellman’s assertion that rescuing a few people can’t amount to much. “After the war, what will it matter?” Heritage’s character declares, predicting genocide. It’s the kind of remark that has Stein throw drinks on her. After all, hasn’t she declared Hellman’s not to drink her whisky?

Agatha Christie (Sarah Edinburgh) is both far more apprehensive about Germans, and the danger they’re all in, to be attracted to all this risk-taking. Her country’s at war. The U.S. is still neutral. Edinburgh’s waspish portrayal of Agatha interested in “details” sleuthing out things she’s not meant to know, wields herself as a physical question-mark, singular, and tightly-observed as an eccentric. Edinburgh was last on stage here in 1993, playing Anne Frank.

Treading through these monster egos, Dracott’s Bernadette and Griffiths’ Toklas are able to placate, and pad about with pivotal reveals of their own. There’s even a lurch of pain Gill enacts, presaging Stein’s end.

It’s Toklas who moves the dial to confession, where each character reveals an epiphanic moment of vulnerability. Toklas recalls her moment of desire for Stein, and Gill’s Stein responds with an equally warming, romantic declaration. Griffiths, in subdued clothing paradoxically like a church warden (Christine Fox and Kit Ellis), invokes a powerful personality through a gauze, a matte surface to whom desire sticks. Gill in one of her strongest performances since Playhouse Creatures in October 2015, inhabits Stein’s booming, increasingly boozing presence, making stone-clad pronouncements. She centres the action, settles resolve.

Regulars Gill and Griffiths also allow a spiral of fresh and returning talent to shimmer. Edinburgh’s memorable quirky and British, revealing how infidelity spurred her famous 11-day absence. Heritage too finds in her Hellman perhaps her finest BLT role to date, ironclad in drawl and drollery. The revelations are Lewis’ Dorothy, from someone more often seen as director; Lake’s quietly heroic Mary and Dracott’s beleaguered but searingly resolved Bernadette.

As the original Guardian review mentioned (it’s pointed up in the epilogue), Hellman was forced to defend her memoir Pentimento in 1983 against charges by Muriel Gardiner that Hellman had appropriated her life story. You’ll have to see why.

What McCasland has managed though is not just to provide a storyline for this but Hellman’s own next work as a submerged outcome; and some recognizable semi-fictions are cleverly recruited.

There’s been another play celebrating Stein and Toklas recently. Edward Einhorn’s The Marriage of Alice B Toklas premiered at Jermyn Street in April 2022, yet another American work debuting here.

Whilst the wartime Stein and Toklas were more compromised than McCasland can address, it’s good that this superb work allows the best of those it portrays, to shine in one intense beam of feminist solidarity, women against tyranny and genocide.

Easily the best production in Brighton this week.

Published October 26, 2023October 26, 2023 by Simon Jenner