Theatre by Somerset Maugham
(1937)
Her dressing-room was like the cabin of a ship. The world seemed a long way off, and she relished her seclusion. She felt an enchanting freedom. She dozed a little, she read a little, or lying on the comfortable sofa she let her thoughts wander. She reflected on the part she was playing and the favourite parts she had played in the past. (Chapter 13)
My view of the world, art and literature rests on history and biology. There were some 3 billion humans alive when I was born in the 1960s, four billion in 1974, five billion in 1987, six billion in 1999 and we reached seven billion in March 2012. By the time I die 20 years hence there will be around 9 billion. The shortage of resources (starting with land and water) the environmental degradation (deforestation, desertification, ocean acidification) and global warming (if it is indeed true) mean that my children will grow up in a world of weeds, dead seas and vast multicultural slums.
Reading Somerset Maugham is to be transported far, far away from this pressing reality, to a world populated by only a few thousand people, the people who count – upper-class, white, English people who’ve been to the right schools and are members of the cabinet, the civil service, the colonial service, along with, maybe, a handful of writers and artists thrown in.
It is a small, cosy world of gentleman’s clubs in Pall Mall, replicated in miniature throughout Britain’s colonies in the East where pukka chaps administer provinces the size of Wales equipped only with a walking stick and a stiff upper lip. Beyond it lie the entire working class of Great Britain – useful as occasional Cockney walk-on parts – and beyond them the vast teeming populations of India, Malaya or any other colonial country where the author sets his scene, ‘natives’ who provide anonymous and exotic backdrops, with the exception of a handful of loyal and dutiful servants.
Even within this very circumscribed circle of jolly decent chaps and chapesses, Maugham rarely loiters for long. His métier is the penetrating snapshot. He establishes a setting – the club, the dinner party – with deceptive simplicity, then one or other of the guests produces an anecdote of astonishing brutality or immorality, before everything winds up with reassuring brandy and cigars.
Even his two most famous novels, The Moon and Sixpence and Cakes and Ale, are really built up from much shorter, potentially discrete stories. The most powerful thing in Moon, Strickland’s affair with his best friend’s wife, could quite easily stand alone as a 30-page story. Similarly, the narrator’s central love affair with Rosie in Cakes and Ale could exist without any of the apparatus of her being married to a famous old writer, let alone the further paraphernalia of Alroy Kear writing his biography of the writer which ostensibly gives the novel its structure.
Theatre
Theatre shares many of these characteristics:
- It is a description of the English theatre in Edwardian and then post-Great War days, the theatre being (in my own experience of it and everything I’ve read and seen about it) itself a small and ‘precious’ world which the actors and everyone involved in likes to think of as an exclusive coterie.
- Despite quite a few walk-on parts, it is really only concerned with three characters – the middle-aged actress Julia Lambert, her charming and devoted husband Michael, and her careless young lover, Tom.
- It is very artfully constructed from individual scenes. It has a very consciously built flavour. Instead of the flowing narrative which the novel is capable of, it is divided into discrete and precise scenes. Maybe it started life as a play. On the surface it is a social comedy with some raw passions occasionally thrown in; but not very far beneath the surface you can see the joins and the framework of its artful assembly, and that, too, is part of the pleasure.
And it is a funny book. Very funny. You can almost hear Maugham chuckling as he produces scene after amusing scene, spins out his comic dialogues and devises his ironic climaxes.
The blurb
The blurb describes the plot thus:
Julia Lambert is in her prime, the greatest actress in England. Off stage, however, she is bored with her handsome husband, coquettish and undisciplined. She is at first flattered and amused by the attentions of a shy and eager young fan, but before long Julia is amazed to find herself falling wildly, dangerously, in love.
Which gives you the names of the characters and the bare bones of the plot, but doesn’t even hint at the sophisticated pleasures on offer.
The plot
The book opens with the middle-aged and very successful married couple – superstar actress Julia Lambert and handsome actor-manager Michael Gosselyn – chatting in the comfort of the their swanky West End house. A non-descript young accountant is in the living room where he has been tasked with going over the books of the couple’s successful London-based theatre company.
Part one – A long flashback
Julia wanders up to Michael’s bedroom and idly opens the old boxes of mementos which are stored there. As in a movie, the screen ripples and we are transported back to the earliest days of their careers, meeting as budding actors still in their teens in the provincial theatre of ‘Middlepool’. Here we learn that Michael is stunningly beautiful, Greek god-like beautiful, but has no passion; he looks great in costume drama but can’t produce much variety of feeling; whereas Julia has tremendous command of herself and the ability to project a wide range of feeling without, in fact, feeling very much herself.
They fall in love, mostly meaning that Julia is besotted with Michael and he acquiesces in her adoration. We follow in detail their fates in various productions, and the dawning realisation that Julia is the real acting star. Michael’s good-humouredly accepts the fact and begins to develop the idea that the couple should go into business together and buy their own theatre.
Michael is picked for a part which involves going to the States for a year. Here his lack of real talent becomes clear, with terrible reviews, but he makes a packet of money. Julia, still in England, develops a growing band of fans including a patient old man, Charles Tamerley, and an ageing lesbian, Dolly de Vries. All these developments occur under the sharp-tongued but benign gaze of the manager of the ‘Middlepool’ theatre company, the lovable Jimmie Langton.
It also happens on the verge of the Great War. Michael’s father is a pukka military man and so when the First World War breaks out, strings are pulled to get Michael made an officer, and he is soon attached to the general staff. He has a cracking war, brisk and efficient for a succession of generals at Staff HQ, while never being in any danger himself. He regularly returns to London to pep up Julia, who continues to perform in the many plays staged during the war to keep up spirits. It was boom years for the theatre, apparently.
They have a baby, Roger, and wait awhile to have sex again. One day, in Michael’s embraces, Julia realises that she is no longer in love with him. He no longer smells young. She is repulsed. Marital relations are not resumed, but this turns out to suit Michael. He is an incredibly posh and proper, polite and decent gentleman, and never liked all that messy business anyway.
So now they are actively looking for backers to help them buy a theatre and set up their own company. There is some comedy about the way that decent, dim Michael doesn’t realise that the rich widow, Dolly de Vries, has a lesbian crush on Julia. Once Julia has carefully explained it, they both realise they can exploit the situation to get the additional funding out of her. Dolly is taken into partnership and they buy, refurbish, and rename a theatre, the Siddons Theatre, after the famous 18th century actress.
Many years pass in which Michael handles the financing and management of the theatre perfectly, and Julia becomes the most famous and accomplished actress in England.
This long flashback, in many of its details quite a lot too good, too simple and too fortunate to be true, is nonetheless very entertaining. The character of the old manager Jimmie Langton is particularly enjoyable, as are the many occasions on which Michael demonstrates that he is a jolly decent, ambitious but scrupulously fair and honest chap. Mention should go to Evie, Julia’s long-suffering and all-seeing dresser, a typical walk-on Cockney part.
Part two – Back to the present: the Tom Fennell plotline
Julia stops reminiscing and returns to the present. End of scene.
In what is effectively Act Two of the book she is rung up the next day by the accountant who was working on the books in scene one. He invites her for tea at his flat in Tavistock Square. On a whim she goes. It is dingy and squalid. To her amazement he ravishes her. Before she knows it she is on the sofa being made love to. Half an hour later, dressed again, bright-eyed and flushed, she stumbles out into the square and catches a taxi back to her swanky West End home.
There then commences the long and, eventually, tiresome story of Julia’s helpless besotted love for young Tom Fennell, the articled clerk with a firm of accountants who we met doing their accounts on the opening page. Tom is slight and nowhere near as handsome as Michael, but young and bright-eyed. Before long Julia suspects his motivation is not love for her but ambition to meet the swanky people she knows, to move in High Society, to ‘get on’. And also because he likes sex.
Julia was shrewd, and she knew very well that Tom was not in love with her. To have an affair with her flattered his vanity. He was a highly-sexed young man and enjoyed sexual exercise. From hints, from stories that she had dragged out of him, she discovered that since he was seventeen he had had a great many women. He loved the act rather than the person. He looked upon it as the greatest lark in the world. (Chapter 14)
Julia buys him lavish presents and begins to accompany him to night clubs where they dance. Michael knows they are friends and, in his innocence, is happy to see a young man get a boost from his lovely wife. In fact Tom has saved Michael quite a bit of money by being sharp with his accounts, which is what matters to a businessman like Michael, and so he’s happy to acquiesce in Julia’s suggestion that they rent out to Tom a spare apartment in a block they’ve recently bought and refurbished.
The next scene is set at the house in Taplow which Michael and Julia rent for the summer. Julia invites Tom to stay for a fortnight, hoping to catch some private time with him lazing on the river or in their bedroom.
But the couple had also invited their rather distant son, Roger, now aged 17 and in his last year at Eton (natch). To Julia’s chagrin, and then anger, young Tom sheds his adult pretensions, reverts to behaving like a teenage boy, and quickly becomes firm friends with Roger. Every day they are off punting or playing tennis or gadding round the countryside in the nippy little roadster which Julia bought Roger for his birthday.
At several points the pair of young lads come home very late and Julia hears them tramping around the landing and bathrooms of the house. Given the track record of surprises in Maugham’s short stories, I was fully expecting Julia to overhear them having sex – which would have produced the most almighty scene between Julia and Tom.
In fact I’ve been reading Selina Hastings’ brilliant biography of Maugham and have been astonished at the sexual promiscuity of Maugham and others in his homosexual circle. In particular, the biography describes in great detail the dependent relationship between Maugham and his gay partner-cum-secretary, Gerald Haxton, a wild roaring boy, a compulsive gambler and charming alcoholic, who not only had sex with Maugham whenever required but pimped for him, bringing back handsome sailors from Marseilles when they were on the Riviera or willing boys on their journeys to exotic places. In return Maugham lavished affection and luxury presents on him, his heart in thrall to the handsome young man whose bad behaviour, tantrums and resentment at being a ‘kept man’ he had to routinely endure.
Which is why, when Julia’s relationship with Tom begins to turn sour, it is hard not to catch echoes of the Maugham-Haxton relationship, and to wonder whether Julia’s feelings can plausibly be attributed to a a woman who has kept herself chaste and faithful through a twenty year-long marriage – or are really the very plausible mixed feelings of an older homosexual for his dashing but hurtful and unfaithful young lover.
Anyway, Tom behaves badly in all kinds of ways and every few pages we have passages of Julia alone, in tears, struggling to control her hurt feelings and wondering why she still loves him.
Tom more or less ignores her during the Taplow weekend. At its conclusion she, with deliberate scorn, gets the butler to give him an envelope containing the money he’ll need to tip the house’s servants. Back in London a letter is delivered by hand containing the money, and also a package containing all the gifts she has lavished on him (cuff links, gold cigarette case etc). He is rejecting her. It is over. But she rings Tom up and, during a tearful phone call, he says how much he hates being ‘a kept boy’. Julia hates him right up to the minute he speaks and then her heart melts. This kind of break-up and tearful reconciliation happens numerous times.
Roger has come to London and spends more time with Tom. One night he comes home and matter-of-factly tells Julia that Tom has just helped him lose his virginity, arranging a night out with two chorus girls, then back to Tom’s where he said ‘Take your pick’.
Julia doesn’t know which to be more upset by, her beloved baby becoming a man, and in such a sordid manner, or the realisation that Tom had slept with both these chorus girls, and in all likelihood many others too.
To add insult to injury, Tom then arranges an introduction for Roger’s seducer, Joan Denver, to visit Julia at the theatre and ask if she can be an understudy in a play. She is stumpy, snub-nosed and ungainly. Not bloody likely, thinks Julia.
Tom tries to persuade her to take on another young aspiring actress he knows (which Julia realises by now is code for ‘has slept with’), a certain Avice Crichton. Julia goes see her perform and is appalled by her bad acting and brassy manner. Angry at Tom (as usual) she agrees to give her Avice a small part, with the sole intention of having her publicly fail and so humiliate her ‘lover’.
Stung to new heights of tearful, heart-wrung fury, Julia puts all her feelings about the wretched affair into her latest performance. This leads to a funny scene. Julia is under the impression she is giving the performance of a lifetime. However, Michael comes backstage to break the news that she was awful. In fact has been awful for the past four days (ever since she was upset by the Crichton incident).
This gives Julia a flash of insight. She realises that she is a great artist and realises that letting her feelings pour out, unimpeded and undisciplined, via the impassioned character in the play is ruinous. She is at her best when she is controlled and calculating in her effects. Great acting isn’t about self-expression, but about the disciplined deployment of effects.
On the back of all this, Michael suggests to Julia that she is run-down and she acquiesces in his suggestion that she go and stay with her ageing mother and aunt (French, as it happens) in St Malo in Brittany.
This episode makes a very pleasant eight or so page interlude in the main plot, with Maugham giving us travel writer type descriptions of the grey stone villages of Brittany. We are by now on about page 185 of the 230-page-long book – but I for one was impatient for the narrative to hurry on to its climax – be it delightfully comic or devastatingly bleak (as his short stories so often are).
In the calm of Brittany she reflects on her life and in particular how unfair she has been to people, especially her long-suffering and wealthy devotee, Charles Tamerley. She returns to London determined to give him what he wants i.e. sex with her. Her elaborate preparations for this grand self-sacrifice, and then her performance of A Lady Waiting To Be Plucked when he arrives to take her to dinner, are hilarious.
Except that Charles doesn’t want to do any Plucking. He freezes as she is in the middle of her seductive best – Julia realises she has made a dreadful mistake – and is hard pressed to escape with her dignity just about intact. It is a very comic scene.
Part three – Avice Crichton
Julia returns home from the Brittany holiday, just as Michael begins rehearsals for the new play which will open the season this coming September. Avice, as she had promised Tom, has a minor part in it, but with an important ten-minute scene. During rehearsals it quickly becomes clear that Avice is wooden and lumpy. Michael wants to sack her, but Julia insists Avice remains a) because if she were fired, then Avice would tell Tom it was Julia’s fault, jealousy etc; b) Julia wants Avice to fail as publicly and embarrassingly as possible, in order to punish Tom.
Cannily, she suggests to Michael that Avice is in awe of him, as director, and that he take her to dinner and try to coax her into a better performance.
My mind was agog with possibilities: will Michael fall in love with Avice, reducing Julia to genuine despair? Will Avice’s acting be transformed by Michael’s guidance so that she acts Julia off the stage and the older woman realises her time is up? What will happen?
Before we can find out, there’s a puzzling chapter where Julia has dinner with her son, Roger, now 18 and back from his summer in Austria before he goes on to Cambridge.
Julia is disconcerted when Roger launches a sustained attack of her character, saying there is nothing whatsoever real about her, she is a tissue of quotations and mannerisms, he dreams of opening the door of a room she’s just gone into and finding it empty.
Roger was brought up in a fantasy land of endless performance, so now he wants Reality, though God knows where he’ll find it… Julia isn’t upset by this so much as puzzled, as she always has been, by a son who lacks her husband’s good looks or her own vitality. Oh well…
Maugham spends so much time and effort on this chapter I wondered whether, right at the end, something melodramatic and soap opera-ish would happen, like Roger killing himself or running off to Africa. But nothing whatever happens with him. He goes off to university to find himself as promised…
And in the event, the first night of the new season is a triumph. Julia acts everyone off the stage. Maugham gives a highly entertaining and instructive explanation of the full panoply of tricks Julia uses to crush and destroy Avice, stealing every scene from her with canny stage ‘business’, by adopting better positioning on stage, by using every trick in the book to upstage her.
The play receives nine curtain calls, after which Michael sweeps into Julia’s dressing room to congratulate her and to scold her for upstaging Avice who, he admits, they’ll have to get rid of.
Tom pops up briefly to admit that, well, yes, actually Avice is rubbish, sorry about that but thank you so much for letting her be in the play and all the help and support you gave her. Julia purrs and smiles but she realises she now couldn’t care less about Tom or Avice. She has completely got over her little ‘adventure’. Then a throng of well-wishers burst in with champagne.
When things have finally quietened down Julia decides she’ll skip the Grand Party being hosted for her by the eternally faithful Dolly the lesbian. Instead, she gets Evie, her long-suffering cockney dresser, to help her slip out the side door, avoid the fans, dressed down in a dull brown coat, grab a taxi and head off to a quiet little side-table at the Berkeley Hotel. Here she a) treats herself to a celebration dinner of steak with fried onions and potatoes, and a tankard of beer – something she has denied herself for the past ten years in the name of keeping slim, and b) stares out over the crowds of young and old, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, drinking, smoking, eating and dancing in the restaurant’s main area, as she ponders on ‘the theatre’.
Real life is the fake, she thinks, real life with its messiness and ugliness. How silly of her son to seek it out. Acting takes the sordid mess of ‘life’ and transforms it into art and symbol, into rounded narratives with depth and meaning. She is free of her passion for that wretched little man. She has an elegant and successful husband who adores her. She has just had one of the great professional triumphs of her life. She has crushed a pathetic little rival like a beetle under her shoe. She has never been so happy. She has never felt so free!
Entertainment
The book is very entertaining on numerous levels, but I found it marvellous and relaxing as a window into a world of genteel manners and decorum which is now utterly lost. We are not only introduced into the circles of the rich and the very rich, via Julia and Michael’s parties, but amusingly watch Julia learn to mimic and play them to perfection.
In fact Julia is not only a ‘character’ in the story, she is a wonderful comic device, in at least two obvious ways:
1. Throughout the book we are given her real thoughts in brackets, placed next to her actual words and deeds, so that we can enjoy the ironic juxtaposition of her harsh inner criticisms of people even as she acts gracefully and politely to them. This reaches a peak of perfection in her later encounters with Dolly de Vries who, alarmed by reports that Julia is gadding round town with a young lover, first of all tells Michael – who promptly tells Julia, in his innocent way believing there is no harm in it. Or in her polite reception of the ambitious little chorus girls Tom pushes her way who, in her heart of hearts, she loathes:
2. And secondly, Julia is almost always acting, performing whatever is appropriate to the scene and setting and people she finds herself with, even her own husband. It is richly comic the way the narrator describes her putting on performances throughout so-called ‘normal’ life, even her performance of a grand lady of the theatre not putting on a performance.
This sense of continual artificiality is not far removed from the world of camp. What I mean is that the story, taken at face value, is a ‘beautiful’ and ‘moving’ tale of a middle-aged lady’s passionate love affair for an ‘impetuous young man’. But Maugham deliberately undermines the seriousness of his own narrative with ironic reminders that almost the entire thing is rich in histrionic performance by the main characters. Even when she’s at her most distraught, a part of Julia’s mind is noting her own mannerisms and tucking them away for possible use in a performance some day.
Here she is inwardly seething at Tom for ignoring her in favour of her son, Roger.
Tom and Roger came back to eat an enormous tea and then played tennis till the light failed. After dinner they played dominoes. Julia gave a beautiful performance of a still-young mother fondly watching her son and his boy friend. (Chapter 14)
When she first meets Michael’s stuffy old parents:
She felt instinctively that she must conceal the actress, and without effort, without deliberation, merely because she felt it would please, she played the part of the simple, modest, ingenuous girl who had lived a quiet country life. (Chapter 4)
When she attends a party filled with silly chorus girls, Julia knows just the right note to strike:
This is the dominant impression of the book – Maugham guying his own character and milking for comic entertainment the grande dame of the theatre is almost never, actually, ‘herself’.
Another comic running thread running throughout the book is the way Julia strings along her aged, wealthy devotee, Charles Tamerley, by staging a variety of ‘scenes’ for him, including the Distraught But Faithful Woman or The Woman Shaken By Emotion for her Lover. All this leads up to the climactic comedic scene where Julia offers him her Virginal Body, and is comically disconcerted to discover that he is not only not interested, but appalled.
This arch self-consciousness is the book’s most distinguishing feature and every scene which features it is deliciously entertaining.
Historical notes
When Charles doesn’t respond to Julia making herself abundantly available to him, she wonders whether he is a) impotent or b) homosexual.
Julia reflectively lit a cigarette. She asked herself if Charles had used his devotion to her as a cover to distract attention from his real inclinations. But she shook her head. If he had been homosexual she would surely have had some hint of it; after all, in society since the war they talked of practically nothing else.
Was homosexuality really that much of a common topic of discussion in the Twenties and Thirties? Is Maugham being satirical? Or was it very much the topic of discussion in his own, very much homosexual circles?
‘Getting off’ This is the expression we used as teenagers in the 1970s to describe have a fumble with a member of the opposite sex. I was surprised to see it being used by posh people in the 1930s.
Sex appeal Also a surprisingly common phrase by the mid-1930s.
‘Sex appeal,’ Julia murmured to herself… ‘It’s not as if I had no sex appeal… It’s ridiculous to suppose that I could have got to my position if I hadn’t got sex appeal. What do people come to see an actress for? Because they want to go to bed with her. Do you mean to tell me that I could fill a theatre for three months with a rotten play if I hadn’t got sex appeal? What is sex appeal anyway?’
Adaptations
Unsurprisingly, this novel about the stage was itself adapted for the stage, and has been made into no fewer than three movie adaptations, the latest as recent as 2004.
ASTROFELLA
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