Rendering 8 (Theatre)

The article under study is taken from The Telegraph and is entitled "Before the Party, Almeida Theatre, review.” It was published by Dominic Cavendish on 29 March 2013, and regards the revival by Matthew Dunster of Rodney Ackland’s 1949 play, which was in its turn an adaptation of a 1926 short-story by William Somerset Maugham.

The article is evidently in favour of the new performance, for a lot of positive coments are carried here on this topic. But, before speaking of the play itself, the author provides us with some details of the synopsis. One learns from his review about a widow who’s grown fed up with mourning the loss of her ill-suited, drunken husband, and who may have had a hand in his death out in West Africa; besides, there appear her frightful family memvers, whose craven adherence to the respectable norms of their middle-class tribe is now threatening to suck the life out of the not-so-young woman’s fresh start with a new man.

Giving appraisal of the play, it’s necessary to point out that Rodney Ackland’s earlier version of the story by Maugham was a success, so that there’s something the new version of the performance can be compared with. According to Dominic Cavendish, the 1949 play fleshed out its wry source in a theatrically entertaining way and ferreted out its nutritious dramatic meat too, for the director managed then to deliver a rebuke to hypocrisy and overbearing propriety. In outspoken terms the author expresses the view that Maugham’s literary work is bitterly satiric in fact: if one is only scoffing at the Skinner household as it faces an inconvenient bombshell moment ahead of an afternoon garden party and not looking closer to home, then they’re rather missing its enduring, darkly comic point. And here, in both plays and the one by Matthew Dunster as well, the main characters – the domineering matriarch Blanche, the would-be politician Aubrey, Laura’s twisted unmarried sister Kathleen and even a fascist-sympathising cook who has locked a Jewish maid in the cupboard – are bitterly ridiculous in their embodiment on the stage.

The author concludes by praising all actors for their brilliant performance – he evidently found no fault with any of them. Though not being a theatre-goer (not because I don’t like this kind of art – there’s just no opportunity to visit it frequently), I’d see this play with pleasure after such a review – for who dares not to like William Somerset Maugham?