THE TELEGRAPH
An English Tragedy: Emotionally
devastating tale of a very English fascist
Charles Spencer reviews An English
Tragedy at Watford Palace Theatre
Ronald Harwood is
an uneven writer, and I have sometimes been unkind
about his work. But when he is on form, he has a
rare gift of combining intellectual rigour with
profound emotion. He is also one of those
increasingly rare devotees of the old-fashioned,
well-made play.
At 73, the author of The Dresser and Taking Sides is
on a roll. He picked up a Bafta last week for his
screenplay for The
Diving Bell and The Butterfly, and flies off to
Los Angeles this Friday to discover whether he has
won the Oscar, too. If he does, it will provide a
companion for the one he received for The Pianist. Nor
would
I be surprised to see this fine new play, An English Tragedy,
transferring to the West End, Harwood's natural
habitat. It tells a gripping true story with
simplicity and power, and somehow manages to move
the audience while also making its flesh creep.
The main character, John Amery, appears to have
been a cross between Lord Haw-Haw and Sebastian
Flyte from Brideshead Revisited. The son of
Leopold Amery, a member of Churchill's Cabinet, and
the older brother of Julian Amery, the long-serving
Tory MP, John was, in contrast, a thoroughly bad
egg. He may have been kind to his
beloved teddy bear, taking it to cafés and
restaurants and buying it drinks and comics, but he
was also an anti-Semitic fascist who broadcast Nazi
propaganda to Britain from Berlin, and tried to
persuade British POWs to fight alongside the Nazis.
In his personal life he was promiscuously
bisexual and enjoyed being tied up and thrashed by
rough trade. In 1945 this unsavoury specimen was
arrested in Italy and put on trial for high treason
at the Old Bailey. There were two
defences that would probably have got him off -
first, that he was a mentally ill moral defective,
and second that he had become a Spanish citizen
while helping Franco, and therefore couldn't be
charged with treason in England. But
Amery astonished his legal advisers and his family
by pleading guilty and was hanged by Albert
Pierrepoint. The standard explanation
was that Amery didn't want to embarrass his
relatives - but, as Harwood points out, he could
hardly have embarrassed them more already.
Instead the dramatist finds the roots of John
Amery's self-incrimination in the fact that though
he kept it secret to facilitate his political
career, Leo Amery was in fact half-Jewish and his
anti-Semitic son was aware of the fact. As a
consequence, John became the victim of both an
Oedipus complex and a corrosive self-hatred. In
the clear light of day this may sound like glib pop
psychology, but in the course of the play it proves
persuasive thanks to the emotional depth of both
writing and acting.
The hot newcomer Richard Goulding gives a
virtuosic performance as John, superficially
charming, witty and camp in the best Brideshead
manner, but with a constant edgy neuroticism about
him and sudden scary glimpses of the truly
psychopathic. Jeremy Child is superbly
moving as his father. The scene in which this
reserved Establishment figure suddenly breaks down
in choking tears as he discusses his first-born with
a psychiatrist is extraordinarily affecting, as is
his heroically dignified farewell to his son, where
the combination of English reticence and raw anguish
put me in mind of Rattigan at his greatest. Diana
Hardcastle is deeply touching, too, as the pilled-up
mother who still sees her son as a beautiful child.
There's a little too much plodding exposition in
Di Trevis's production, and Ralph Koltai's
swastika-based conceptual design does the actors no
favours. But where it matters, An English Tragedy is
strong, true and emotionally devastating.
This is a hard,
harrowing but humane play by Ronald Harwood. As
in all his best work, he’s writing about people who
hide some secret, as well as a sense of guilt for
hiding it. The secret of Leo Amery, one of Churchill’s
ministers, was that his mother was Jewish, and so,
therefore, was he. His son John, who was hanged for
broadcasting Nazi propaganda from Germany, was a
difficult child and became a self-obsessed, neurotic
adult, a moral cripple. This is not only an English or
a Jewish tragedy; it’s about the price the persecuted
pay for their secrets.
Di Trevis’s production, flawlessly acted, has two
master performances. John (Richard Goulding) is a
puppet of resentment and of a will that isn’t quite
his own. You sense that he knows his father’s secret,
though it’s never stated; it’s his contempt for him,
and the loathing of his inheritance, that turned him
into a Jew-hater and destroys him. Jeremy Child is
Leo, a man living in his own shadow, carrying his
impeccable Englishness like a shield from his
conscience. Unforgettable and unmissable.
Like Lord HawHaw,
John Amery made pro-Nazi broadcasts from Germany to
Britain during the war. He even visited PoW camps to
recruit Englishmen into his Legion of St George, which
he hoped would fight with the SS against the Russians.
In 1945 he was condemned to death for treason, all
without trying to exculpate himself. According to a
Times report, he pleaded guilty to every charge,
half-smiled, bowed to the judge and, without saying
another word, was dispatched to death row.
What motivated his treachery? Why didn’t he mount a
defence that might have saved him from the gallows?
These are questions that have long fascinated Ronald
Harwood, who wrote The
Dresser, won an Oscar for his screenplay of The Pianist and
has just picked up a Bafta, this time for The Diving Bell
and The Butterfly;
and I suppose they have special frisson because
Amery’s father, Leo, was Secretary of State for India
and Burma and his brother, Julian, became an MP.
Harwood’s answer isn’t wholly convincing, but that
doesn’t matter because it emerges tentatively and
speculatively from a play that intrigues and grips.
It’s a rather talky piece. Since it is set after
Amery’s arrest, there’s a lot of filling-in of facts
and anxious speculation about the present and future,
much of it involving Nicholas Rowe as his solicitor,
Lucinda Millward as the psychiatrist whom he refuses
to see, and Jeremy Child and Diana Hardcastle as his
baffled, stricken parents. But when Richard Goulding’s
Amery is parading his snobbish, virulent ego, Di
Trevis’s production comes fully to life. Thanks to
this young actor’s energy and expertise, you get the
impression of a chaotic man-child whose antisemitism
and anticommunism are dangerously adult, but whose
prime bond is with his teddy bear: a mix of Streicher,
McCarthy and Evelyn Waugh’s Sebastian Flyte.
It says much for Harwood that he seeks to
understand rather than merely condemn. Though Amery
refused to see the shrinks, their consensus after
talking to everyone from nannies to his Harrow
housemaster was that he was a psychopath; and
Goulding's weird babblings and paranoid ravings would
seem to justify that, along with a life that had been
louche, rackety, destructive and self-destructive. But
what’s especially emphasised is his jealousy of his
conventional brother and, more, contempt for a father
who had hidden his Jewish origins to advance his
political career.
Hence, surely, the title. For Harwood, the English Tragedy
is a reticence, a habit of evasion, that had toxic
effects. He seems almost to be suggesting that Amery
supported Hitler and the death camps because at some
dark, mad level he had come to hate himself and his
own blood. In effect, he committed suicide, which was
why both warders and hangman found him unusually
brave. Far-fetched? Perhaps – but it makes for
striking, stimulating drama.
Ronald Harwood is
fascinated by questions of identity. His last play, Mahler's Conversion,
dealt with the the composer's switch from Judaism to
Catholicism. His far superior new work is about the
fatal consequences of politician Leo Amery's denial of
his Jewish inheritance. My only gripe about a
genuinely intriguing play is that it focuses less on
Leo than his son, John, who was hanged for treason in
1945.
Starting with John's capture by Italian partisans,
the first half builds up a psychological portrait of a
Tory cabinet minister's son who broadcast Nazi
propaganda from Berlin. As his parents are quizzed by
a shrink and solicitor and the man himself by an
intelligence officer, we learn that Amery junior's
hatred of communists and Jews was the product of a
pathological instability.
But it is Leo's admission of his own suppressed
ancestry that opens up even more fruitful territory.
Harwood suggests that Leo, by conforming to perceived
notions of "Englishness" in a time of active
antisemitism, helped drive his son into political
extremism. Harwood's larger point is that the real
English tragedy is an inherited contempt for the
alien. But I am not sure it wholly explains John
Amery's pathetic downfall.
This is, however, a play that deals with
refreshingly big issues. Di Trevis's production,
staged on an ingenious Ralph Koltai set composed of
swastika-shaped platforms, is also impeccably acted.
Richard Goulding, as attached to his teddy bear as
Waugh's Sebastian Flyte, brings out all of John
Amery's exhibitionist hysteria and arrested
development. Jeremy Child, as Leo, movingly shows the
epitome of establishment
Englishness confronting his own self-deception.
There is sterling support from Diana Hardcastle as his
snobbish wife and Michael Fenton Stevens as a probing
intelligence officer. Harwood has found in an odd
footnote of English history a metaphor for our flawed
national psyche.
At 74, Ronald
Harwood is showing no signs of slowing down. He's
just won a Best Adapted Screenplay Bafta for The Diving Bell and
The Butterfly
and he may soon be picking up a second Oscar (his
first, in 2002, was for The Pianist). Before that,
though, he has unveiled his latest stage play, An
English Tragedy, in a powerful production by Di
Trevis at the Palace Theatre, Watford. It
might look a shade incongruous that a drama with
this title is performed on a swastika-shaped stage
(the set is by Ralph Koltai). But the focus of
Harwood's engrossing, eloquent play is the British
fascist John Amery, who was arrested and charged
with high treason in 1945. What gives the trial its
fascinating twist is that the 33-year-old prisoner
in the dock was the son of Leo Amery, a senior Tory,
close friend of Churchill and former Secretary of
State for India and Burma. In mounting a
case for the defence, John's connections were both
an asset and a liability, but all efforts were
rendered futile when he pleaded guilty. Did he do so
to spare his family embarrassment? Or was there a
deeper reason? And did his son's conviction prompt
any soul-searching in Leo?
Richard Goulding vividly communicates the weird
emotional disconnectedness of John, who flounces
round his cell and talks to his teddy like an
anti-Semitic version of Sebastian Flyte. He also
suggests that this pansexual embezzler, alcoholic,
bigamist and fantasist is a lost, pathetic figure.
Determined to spearhead a crusade against the twin
evils of Jewry and Communism, he toured the Allied
prison camps recruiting for his soi-disant League of
St George, but he only managed to scrape up 57
volunteers. Even his Nazi pals took exception to his
drunken sexual escapades.
The play explores the terrible price of
concealing one's true identity and living a lie.
Jeremy Child as John's father conveys the agony of
confronting the fact that his refusal to acknowledge
in public key aspects of his heritage may have
helped drive his son into self-hating extremism.
Diana Hardcastle is heartbreaking as the doting
mother. A thought-provoking drama with a compelling
subject.