A Separate Peace, review: Jenna Coleman shines in Tom Stoppard's newly relevant study of isolation
Amid one of the (so-far) worst of years, recalling one of the best affords some escapist comfort. 1966 was happy, if busy, for Tom Stoppard. His first child (Oliver) was born, his first (actually only) novel – Lord Malquist and Mr Moon – was published; August at the Edinburgh Fringe saw the premiere of the play that would make his name aged 29: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; and the same week, on August 22, the BBC broadcast a half-hour play of his.
One of four TV dramas he wrote between 1965 and 1967, A Separate Peace was wiped with the rest of the multi-authored series it appeared in (standard malpractice at the time in the Beeb). The script, thankfully, remains – and on Saturday evening, back it came to quasi televisual life in a new initiative of “virtual play readings”, going out live just once online, to raise funds for struggling creatives (and sundry charities). This being for a good cause (and in honour of Stoppard), what a cast director Sam Yates had “assembled”, with David Morrissey, Jenna Coleman and Denise Gough all braving the challenge from their own domiciles, craftily customised to provide a uniform aesthetic.
The piece proved simple, conceptually effective, and instructive in terms of Stoppard’s artistry, but a few filaments short of the brilliance he’d later show. Morrissey took the role of John Brown, an unassuming enigma of a man who arrives at a private nursing home with no discernible ailment, seeking to get away from it all and put his feet up, for as long as his stash of cash lasts. “To stay in bed for tea is almost impossible in decent society,” runs his Wildean line of thought, “…but in a hospital it’s not only understood, it’s expected.”
He’s a familiar Stoppardian figure – a dissident individual, threatening coercive social norms – albeit coming from a place of indolence (“sloven-ia”, perhaps) not the Communist bloc. He’s met with various shades of irritated bafflement and tolerant concern – from the duty nurse (Maggie Service) who checks him in, the doctor (Gough) who fretfully confers with others on the phone, the nurse who befriends him to tease out his back-story (Coleman) and last but not least kindly no-nonsense Matron (played, gender-flipped, by Stoppard’s fourth son Ed, recently seen in his pater’s Leopoldstadt, another sad casualty of Covid-19).
The lockdown-enforced, Zoom-assisted presentation accentuated the work’s strangeness. Each actor was in non-period black clothes, defined against a confining clinical white backdrop. Thus abstracted, we could almost have been watching Pinter, though the latter would surely not have allowed the psychological riddle (related to war-time experience, and prior) to be solved or even the patient to escape.
Still, it worked well technologically in real-time (a thousand tuned in, the streaming was glitch-free, the sound design especially impressive). With a laidback Morrissey obviously glancing at his script, the women shone brightest: Gough comically intense and a deadpan Coleman staring arrestingly, inscrutably, into her camera as if examining her patient’s soul. More broadly, examining our yearning for isolation, the peculiarity and final impossibility of that, the play proved an eminently suitable case for digital treatment right here, right now in our testingly atomised, topsy-turvy world.