London Theatre Guide

Wednesday November 14, 2001

Stephen Dillane to play the best part of his death

A new play Life After George will hit the Duchess Theatre in February next year. Stephen Dillane stars as Peter George, the eponymous hero with one particularly striking feature: he’s dead. The play runs as a series of flashbacks, seen from the perspective of his three-ex wives who meet to discuss his funeral arrangements. They mull over George's life as a charismatic university professor with a history of hippy activities in the 60s, with each wife representing a different era in George’s life.

Dillane has a stellar record; he played the lead role of Hamlet in Peter Hall’s 1994 production and was nominated for an Olivier award for his role in The Real Thing at the Donmar in 1999, a performance which also won him a Tony. Life After George also features Cheryl Campbell and Joanne Pearce.

Written by Australian playwright Hannie Rayson, the show has been a great success in its native country. It is directed by Michael Blakemore, whose credits include Copenhagen and the blockbuster Kiss Me Kate, and produced by Michael Codron Plays Ltd. The play opens on February 19 following previews.

Life After George

2002

Independent

Saturday March 2, 2002

The five best plays  (an excerpt)

In London and around the country

by Paul Taylor

1 Kiss Me, Kate (Victoria Palace)

Michael Blakemore's joyous, Tony-Award-winning revival c of this Cole Porter musical just keeps topping itself, leaving the audience on a wave of unalloyed joy. Booking to 8 Jun

2 The Prince of Homburg (Lyric, Hammersmith)

Von Kleist's profound 1811 masterpiece, set within the Prussian army, gets a rare revival from Neil Bartlett, a director absolutely made for this material. To 30 Mar

3 Noises Off (Comedy Theatre)

The best new play of 2001. Martin McDonagh's hilarious satire on the psychotic sentimentality of the terrorist mind triumphantly transfers from Stratford to London. To 23 Feb

4 Life After George(Duchess Theatre)

Stephen Dillane is beautifully understated as the Professor in this astringent Australian comedy about the creeping loss of idealism in academe and intellectual life in general.

5 Smoking with Lulu (Soho Theatre)

The British Theatre Guide

March 2002

Life After George

by Philip Fisher

For anyone who remembers Malcolm Bradbury's History Man, Professor Peter George will seem familiar. The (anti-) hero of this award-winning Australian play is something of a reincarnation of that archetypal radical 70s academic. As the playwright says of him at the start, this is "the joyride of your life".

This play seems to have a great deal going for it. It is generally well acted with excellent performances in particular from Stephen Dillane as the Professor and from Shakespearean actress Joanne Pearce as his Germaine Greer-like second wife, Lindsay.

Within a set that starts as a world turned silver like the result of a cheapskate Midas touch, we are introduced to Professor Peter George, his three wives and daughter. Almost immediately, as the eulogies ring out, we see him riding heavenwards on a (silver) coffin with a beautiful backdrop. Peter J Davison's design is simple but very attractive. It is perhaps significant that vibrant colours always stay on the periphery.

The wives quite nicely delineate the different sides to the Australian History Man. His first, played by Cheryl Campbell, is an artist who through idealism gives up her career to follow her husband to Australia. They are first seen together during the Evenements in Paris in 1968. This is George at the height of his radicalism.

The best character acting then comes out as George meets the gushing, enthusiastic 21 year old Lindsay. Pearce, wearing patched denim hotpants, is fully convincing in this role. She soon usurps her predecessor and becomes wife number two. She matures into a cold calculating professor as happy in fund-raising and management as concentrating on academic issues. This leads to friction with her idealistic and greatly loved husband. It also gives Rayson the chance to explore the art v. money debate that rages in Universities around the world.

Eventually it all becomes too much and George succumbs to the charms of a woman over 25 years his junior who is reputed to have great intellectual depth. The one weakness of the play is that pretty Poppy seems to be a bimbo, not the genius of her generation.

Throw into the pot a couple of unfulfilled and unhappy children from the first marriage and you have the recipe for a very funny, occasionally touching portrait of a man who struggles with his nature as he grows older. He cannot resist his instincts for womanising and acting as a Victorian father despite otherwise impeccable liberal credentials.

Under Michael Blakemore's sensitive direction, the cast realise their characters well and their body language adds a great deal towards a deeper understanding of the underlying stresses of life with as well as after George. Blakemore has a great challenge in getting timing right as the filmic short scenes often bleed into each other and characters rush on and off stage often gaining or losing decades along the way. He is generally successful in achieving this.

Whats on Stage

Friday March 1, 2002

Dillane's Life After George Closes After One Month

by Terri Paddock

Following lukewarm reviews and despite the involvement of award-winning actor Stephen Dillane and director Michael Blakemore, Hannie Rayson's Life After George will close less than a month after opening. The Australian play opened at the West End's Duchess Theatre on 19 February (previews from 14 February) and had been booking until 15 June 2002. It will now close three months early on 16 March 2002.

In Life After George, Dillane plays a charismatic professor, Peter George, whose three wives meet up to arrange his funeral. The women represent the fulcrum of the professor's free-loving life, from the carefree 1960s to the present day. The play unfolds in a series of flashbacks, told from the perspectives of the women who shared in three different eras of his life.

Dillane himself received good notices for his performance in Life After George. The actor's last appearance in the West End was in the 1999 Donmar revival of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, which later transferred to the West End and Broadway. The much-lauded production garnered numerous accolades, including a Tony Award and Olivier nomination of Best Actor for Dillane. On television, the actor has appeared in The Rector's Wife, while films have included Sarajevo and Firelight.

Director Blakemore has also been much more accustomed to hits of late. Despite not winning any Oliviers, his revival of Cole Porter musical Kiss Me Kate won many awards on Broadway and has extended its West End run at the Victoria Palace where it opened last October. His other recent credits include the National's Copenhagen (another multi award winner, on both sides of the Atlantic), Alarms and Excursions and Mr Peters' Connections.

George's wives are played by Cheryl Campbell, Joanne Pearce and Anna Wilson-Jones. Also in the cast are Susannah Wise and Richard Hope. Life After George is designed by Peter J Davison, with lighting by Paul Pyant, sound by John Leonard and Robert Tory and music by Terry Davies.

The play opens at George’s funeral, where we are introduced to his three wives and his daughter. Between them they tell the story of Peter George, an inspiring and radical academic committed throughout his life to revolution - and to women. George is an expat British academic and influential thinker, but we have to take their word for the latter as the real picture of George that emerges is of a stubborn, selfish womaniser. He has led an interesting life, but it is the second wife, Lindsay, who has the really good story to tell.

Stephen Dillane as George is a hip-swaying, corduroy-clad, hugely likeable eccentric. Joanne Pearce as second wife Lindsay is energetic and clumsy - props go flying as she blusters her way from PhD student to successful academic career. Barefoot in one scene, court shoes and business suit in the next, her accent travels from Sydney to Melbourne to Auckland and back again, but at least this makes us wonder what she’s hiding.

Lindsay was one of George’s PhD students, they had an affair, had an open marriage, and then they separated. In the present Lindsay is Dean of Arts, and her hijacking of the arrangements for George’s funeral is seen by his distraught third wife, Poppy, as an attempt to use his memory to promote the benefits of the university’s new relationship with the corporate world.

There is obvious political drama in Life After George, as George and Lindsay clash over the future of the university, but less fashionable - and less obvious - is the drama of the women. All three wives are left wondering whether the sacrifice they made for George’s career was worth it. It is hard to see what a successful, ambitious academic like Lindsay has sacrificed until the end, when her true tragedy is revealed.

The play moves from Paris to Melbourne, Tuscany and finally Flinders Island. Paul Pyant’s lighting design is atmospheric and beautiful - from the glorious sun on rooftops in Paris to the humid light filtering through Venetian blinds in Melbourne. Light really does look like that at a certain time of day in Australia.

George the husband was no angel, nor was George the father, His revolutionary credentials vanished when it came to his daughter, Ana. He balked at supporting her ambition to go to Switzerland and meditate for world peace. It is Ana who shows herself to be the truly radical one by refusing to go to university or to find herself a niche in the world.

The father and daughter reconciliation scene on a sandy beach is a familiar one in Australian plays - the lost child searching for its mother or father, or the other way around. As an Australian of roughly the same age as Ana, I know that at school she probably studied Michael Gow’s Away, the first significant Australian play to show the domestic reconciliation that always seems to take place, Tempest-like, on the beach.

In between studying the English writers Shaw, Stoppard and Larkin during my schooldays, there was barely time left over for Australian writers, let alone Australian playwrights! Life After George reassures me that those days really are long gone.

The Mail on Sunday

Sunday February 24, 2002

Life After George  (an excerpt)

by Georgina Brown

3 stars out of 5

Editor's note:  The article also included reviews for Lady Windermere's Fan and The Feast of Snails. 

Much more engaging is the hero of the week's second and infinitely more substantial new play, Life After George, by Australian writer Hannie Rayson.  But then any man as scruffy, mercurial and intellectually flirtatious as the gorgeously Geordie-accented Peter George is going to be dangerously attractive, and even more so when played by the divine Stephen Dillane.  Rayson's play endeavours to discover whether George and his radical ideas are worth the attention he attracts.

For one of those post-flower-power Leftie Sixties academics who say the primary goal of higher education is to have lots of sex ('sexuality is the engine-room of revolution'), George is surprisingly keen on marriage, despite being too selfish to be anything but a lousy husband and father.  This play is really about the women in his life and the fallout following his death.  

While Rayson has skilfully woven the past into the present, she tends to let her characters tell us about themselves rather than leave the drama to speak for itself.  The play is also bulging with only partly digested ideas about the death of intellectual experimentation in favour of market-driven vocational training.

Still, at its warm, juicy core lies a fascinating examination of the changing face of feminism, women and wives over the past 30 years.  Wife one, played by Cheryl Campbell, is a posh, voluptuous painter who meekly followed her husband to Australia.  Wife two, superbly played by Joanne Pearce, is a feisty feminist who shares his intellectual passion but graduates into a commercially-driven philistine dean of the arts faculty and becomes his enemy.  Wife three - Anna Wilson-Jones's dreamy and devoted Poppy - is devastated almost to dumbness when George dies.

Rayson dares to suggest that while each has suffered from George's egotism, they have also been enriched.  Marvellous, moving performances in a play well worth getting your teeth into.

But Life After George is not a dry discourse about tertiary education. Rayson has won prizes and return seasons around Australia not simply for challenging an ideology, but for making the subject human, emotional and intellectually passionate. "I was amazed at the extent to which people cared so profoundly about the issues; they clearly felt their core values were being undermined and they showed it by crying, and, most surprisingly, by talking back to the play. On any night in the theatre you could hear loud gasps, sobs, people shouting out 'That's right' – it was like being at the panto!" recalls Rayson, unable to repress one of her characteristic giggles.

The play is also a great vehicle for actors, with meaty roles for three women and a charismatic man. As soon as Producer Michael Codron had acquired the rights, he had no trouble in persuading Australian expatriate director Michael Blakemore to take on the production; Blakemore in turn had no difficulty in attracting Stephen Dillane to play George. Cheryl Campbell and Joanne Pearce are also in the cast.

The George of the title is both lecturer and letcher – he advocates sexual freedom and political radicalism. He marries three times, swapping each wife for a younger model. When his widows come together to bury him, they look back on the life of a man who infuriated them, but who also inspired them. "Audiences were really polarised in their response to George," says Rayson. "I myself was in love with him, so it came as a rude shock when people found him loathsome because of his philandering or his politics. I just loved his huge appetite for life. I didn't judge the womanising – I felt I wanted him to work through the 'It Girls' of his generation. I don't think there was anything malicious to it, he was just selfish and curious, always wanting to know more. The women in the play are the map of 30 years of George's evolution."

While the first wife, Beatrix, is a gentle soul with a bohemian spirit and the mother of George's daughter, she is essentially conservative. More challenging is Lindsay, the second wife, a student radical who rises up the ranks within the university. She is chillingly efficient (particularly in a very funny scene in which she completely takes over the organisation of George's funeral). Rayson says, "She's used feminism to fuel her personal ambition."

Poppy, the third wife, is, says Rayson, "an inappropriately young PhD student, a cyber chick who edits a zine. She's post-modern and has no radical heart." Or at least not until the climax of the play, which prompts her to do something seriously subversive.

The tone of the play is one of passion and vehemence. What came as a surprise to Rayson was the fact that it made people laugh. "I didn't set out to write a comedy, but people laugh at the bitchiness between the wives. I think that's because until now, the portrayal of women has been hidebound, because male playwrights have been too scared to tackle feminism."

Rayson, in her forties, is old enough to have experienced the Sixties and Seventies, the formative decades in George's political evolution. "I don't view those years as trite, the way it is fashionable to do now. I genuinely believe that was an empowering time, and that we had real purchase on the democratic process. Yes, there was naivety, but there was also optimism and faith about making a better future. Now it's the era of the end of politics and we are all so disengaged from the process," laments Rayson. The playwright, who lives in an inner-city suburb of Melbourne, campaigned vigorously against some of the most right wing reforms of Jeff Kennett, the Premier of Victoria. "I just don't accept that the economic paradigm is the only one that matters," she explains.

Although George is her most successful work to date, breaking all box office records in Australia for a locally written work, Rayson is no newcomer to the theatre; as well as her previous award-winning works, she's had a film made of one of her plays, Hotel Sorrento, her work has been translated and performed in Japan, and read at the Comedie Française and she's also written several award winning episodes of Australia's favourite TV drama series, Seachange. But she didn't let the deadline for her next play, a dynastic exploration of Australia's rural crisis, prevent her from attending the London premiere of George. Now she hopes that he'll seduce his audience yet again and take on a new life.

Independent

Friday February 22, 2002

Life After George, Duchess Theatre, London

By George, I think they've cracked it

by Jonathan Myerson

He is also the son of a Newcastle miner, and is now dead, having crashed his light aircraft on Flinders Island, near Melbourne University, where he has taught history since 1969.

Life after George recaps his life with three wives and one daughter at the moment they gather to remember him.

Michael Blakemore’s involving and alertly performed production is the first real surprise package of the new West End season.

At its heart is a furious row between George and his second wife, Lindsay (deep-voiced, lip-trembling Joanne Pearce), about what is happening in universities all over the world.

Students are allowed to choose vocational courses. George erupts in fury. Instead of educated citizens, the university is producing corporate fodder.

This is the centre of Stephen Dillane’s unshowy yet hypnotic performance as the philandering George, a man for whom hope is a moral responsibility and sensuality a proof of existence.

Cheryl Campbell and Ann Wilson-Jones as the other wives – one wise and embittered, the other dewy-eyed with devotion – come at him in a pincer movement of affection and accusation.

A bright new play, a feast of good acting. Bravo!

At first this Australian dramatist seems to be offering a work that has much in common with Malcolm Bradbury's entertaining novel The History Man. The George of the title is a passionately left-wing don at a Melbourne University who seems to have spent his entire career seducing nubile young women with the help of Marxist dialectic.

He looks back nostalgically to his great days during the evenements of Paris in 1968, and looks forward optimistically to a better world, while leaving a trail of emotional devastation. As the first of his three wives ruefully observes, it wasn't until she met George that she realised that "Lefties could be as indifferent to other people's suffering as any bull-necked capitalist."

But this unusually rich play offers much more than an analysis of the painful contrast between public platitudes and private passions. With a technically audacious use of flashbacks, the piece consistently contrasts the idealism of the Sixties and Seventies, misguided though much of it may have been, with the confusion, solipsism and cynicism of the present day.

And in her portrait of George's extended family, who have come together for his funeral following his death in a plane crash, the dramatist conjures up a complex and often affecting web of human relationships. Hurts linger and resentments fester, yet individuals still reveal themselves as capable of generosity.

What I admire most about the play is its refusal either to oversimplify or rush to judgment. It would have been easy to present George as a manipulative bastard, but even those who have been betrayed by him speak of his ability to inspire as well as infuriate and carelessly wound. And all the supporting characters - his three ex-wives, his damaged daughter and his best friend - have a similar satisfying richness about them.

The only time that Rayson seems to be banging a drum is in stating her conviction that the intellectual freedom of universities in the Sixties and Seventies, when the pursuit of knowledge and experience were valued for their own sake, is infinitely preferable to the market values and vocational training so in vogue at universities today.

Michael Blakemore directs with his usual lucidity. In lesser hands I suspect that Life After George might easily have seemed a bewildering muddle, but Blakemore makes the time shifts, the arguments and the relationships satisfyingly clear.

My only real beef about this resonant play concerns Peter J Davison's depressing set - a book-lined room painted in a single dull shade of grey. It does little to evoke either the drama's changing locations or the vivid colour of Rayson's writing.

There can be no complaints about the performances, though. As George, Stephen Dillane has a rumpled charm - and a keen intelligence - that persuades you he is much more than a devious hypocrite, while Cheryl Campbell, Joanne Pearce and Anna Wilson-Jones bring the three contrasting wives to vivid and often affecting life.

Pearce, in particular, as a hard-nosed career academic, is overwhelming when she suddenly lets the audience into a world of long-hidden anguish, while Susannah Wise is almost equally moving as the confused daughter who has never got over her parents' divorce.

With Charlotte Jones's Humble Boy packing them in at the Gielgud, it's the women dramatists who are currently proving that there is still a place for clever, witty, deeply felt drama in the West End.

The Age

Thursday February 21, 2002

Life after George moves on

by Stephanie Bunbury

Only a few years ago, the idea that a play about intellectual life in Australia would show in the West End would have seemed like a joke. Even now, one line in Hannie Rayson's Life After George, which opened in London's 500-seat Duchess Theatre last night, gets a particularly appreciative titter.

"Australian history?" says George's first wife, Beatrix, when he accepts a job at an undisguised University of Melbourne in the history department. "I didn't know it had any."

After the first night performance was over, a glowing Hannie Rayson said she had felt moved to hear the local references - a house in Parkville, a pivotal meeting on the St Kilda Pier - resound in a traditional London theatre. "I don't know what it is, except to say that I'm moved to hear my town celebrated here."

Life After George, which loops around the life of a radical academic as his wife, two ex-wives, daughter and best friend gather to try to plan his funeral, was a critical and commercial hit in Australia. It is too soon to know how British critics will treat Life After George.

The audience seemed approving but restrained; actor Tim Piggott-Smith, who was among them, said at the interval that it was "a real first-night audience, sitting back and saying 'show me' ". The first half, he said, was full of "beautiful writing, if not as yet very dramatic". The first half does, indeed, burn slowly, as George's wives and their intellectual convictions are gradually delineated. There was polite silence and hesitant laughter. In the second half, as the women's conflict intensifies, the audience's engagement did too.

Michael Blakemore, the director, said afterwards that he loved the play as soon as he read it. "It was a page turner as well as being about something, as well as dealing with real issues in that particularly Australian way of emotional directness and directness of conviction. English writers are too frightened to do that. They are too afraid of mockery."

Blakemore, also an Australian, has had a glittering expatriate career. Last year, he became the first director to win Tony awards both for a musical, Kiss Me Kate, and a play with Michael Frayn's Copenhagen. In the past he has directed several of David Williamson's plays in London and in America.

"They did well, but they never took off with the general public because they didn't have very much idea of what Australia was like," he said. "But all that's changed now; young people know so much more about Australia than they did."

Even so, the English cast's attempts at Australian accents waver dangerously. Anna Wilson-Jones, who plays George's third wife Poppy, said they were coached by her understudy, Australian Miranda Barber. "We just had to do the best we could," she said. Becoming Australian was not just a matter of flat vowels; Blakemore, she said, urged them to be straightforward.

"The English are very polite and tend to tiptoe around issues," she says, "so when it came to a scene, you'd be asking 'what are the layers here?' And Michael would tell us just to tell the story." The undoubted star of the show is Stephen Dillane, who plays George the Marxist history teacher with a sort of suppressed fire of conviction that, even when he is still, makes him charismatic and compelling to watch.

Financial Times

Thursday, February 21, 2002

Not good enough for its star

by Alastair Macaulay

I knew nothing beforehand about Life after George, but, because it stars Stephen Dillane, I was looking forward to it. If you've seen Dillane in any of his best roles you should know the awe he can inspire. Brilliance, brains, neurosis, irony: these things come naturally to him.

Yet Life after George leaves you wondering why Dillane is in it. George is an unorthodox leftwing academic with three successive wives, a Brit inspired by 1968 Parisian radicalism who winds up teaching in an Australian university. The role, apart from asking him to perform in a Newcastle accent, doesn't stretch him.

The play, by the Australian writer Hannie Rayson, opened in Melbourne in 2000, and I'd guess its original production worked much better than this. Rayson's idea of academe just doesn't ring true: she gives us virtually a cartoon of departmental wranglings, and expects us to believe that George was important because it tells us that he corresponded with Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, and Milton Friedman.

Yes, Life after George is one of those plays that seek to impress us by dropping names. In 1968 Paris, George rushes home to tell his first wife Beatrix that, at the Deux Magots, he was sitting next to Simone de Beauvoir and she was reading Hegel. Later, his supposedly very academic second wife Lindsay enters and says "I've just been reading Engels! So bourgeois, so new!" She sounds sillier, and considerably less sincere, than the stenographer in Pal Joey who sings "I was reading Schopenhauer last night, and I think Schopenhauer was right". And Rayson sounds sillier and less sincere than both.

The main action of the play is after George's death, and we chiefly see him in flashbacks. Dillane attempts no flashy acting differentiations between Young George, Less Young George, and Middle-Aged George: what impresses us is what is constant about George. "My life has been about conversation," he quietly says: it's a lovely little moment, but then the play never gives us one good conversation between George and anyone. Dillane does little wrong (the accent could be more convincing), but then he leaves you feeling he has little to do. A more showy, more glamorous actor might make a stronger impression.

The play is liveliest when the wives conflict. If a male playwright had created the character of Lindsay, he'd be called misogynist. She's a pretentious vindictive fraudulent philistine bitch, and the Wicked Witch of the West commits fewer crimes against humanity than she. I want to admire Joanne Pearce for being shrewd enough to play the character gently, coolly - but I'm afraid I find her invariably artificial, from the sound of her such-deep-feeling voice and tragedy-queen oeillades, and so even her subtleties feel like faking.