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A gentle journey through time
The odd couple: Hoke, played by the splendid Don Warrington, and tries to make a point to Daisy, played by Gwen Taylor. Pictures: Nicholas Dawkes Driving Miss Daisy Belgrade Theatre, Coventry **** I MISSED seeing
Wendy Hiller as Daisy Werthan in the UK launch of Alfred Uhry's
Driving Miss Daisy
at London's Apollo Theatre. That was in 1988,
a year after its off-Broadway premiere starring Morgan Freeman as the
black African-American chauffeur (Freeman later also starred in the
film, with Jessica Tandy). Two years ago, this
entertaining, undoubtedly heart-warming play (‘Play with a big heart',
yelled the billboards) was revived on Broadway, with Vanessa Redgrave
and James Earl Jones, and ran briefly at The present, fairly stayed staging, an offshoot
of the Redgrave production in conjunction with the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre
in Guildford, is by American David Esbjornson, veteran stager of Arthur
Miller (directing Patrick Stewart), Tennessee Williams, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, and several recent new plays; also the brains behind an
authoritative West End production of Aaron Sorkin's A Few Good Men
(starring Hollywood heartthrob Rob Lowe); and associate director Jon
Emmanuel.
Which means the cast, as well as the staging,
must be good. Driving Miss Daisy is about an elderly white
Southern Jewish woman, Daisy Werthan (initially aged 72; she expires in
her latter 90s, so Uhry's scenario leads us by the hand from 1948 to
1973), who is saddled with a new black driver by her businessman son.
Mrs. Werthan (Gwen Taylor, as effective at portraying angry old age as, say, Beryl Reid) is making more than one transition. Born in quite humble circumstances, she has come into wealth the way families of self-made men do, both before and after the Depression. She has a little of the arrogance of privilege, but it is wafer thin; moody and prickly at first, she is changeable; but her humanity runs deeper. Ian Porter as Boolie, Daisy's son and Hoke's boss Having grown up in the almost instinctively
prejudicial environment of the American South, she witnesses segregation
and the growth of the Ku-Klux clan, and that, the impact of Martin
Luther King, the underlying decency of her roots (though what are they?)
and above all, the enriching relationship that evolves with Coleburn
(the wonderfully inflected Don Warrington), render her a woman not of
the early, but of the late, 20th century (as she is indeed by
the end). Her prejudice, if there was a residue of it, dissolves in a
puff. The play, with intermittent, sometimes insistent
and (up to a point) dramatically useful interruptions, telephonic or
otherwise, by her son (Ian Porter, a good foil. Porter understudied the
role on Broadway; has played All My Sons at the Bristol Old Vic,
The Glass Menagerie at Derby Playhouse; and one can imagine both
playwrights' idioms suiting him well). This not-quite-grown-up lad is
called Boolie Werthan (curious: my dictionary gives ‘Boolie' as a) a
nickname for Julie; b) slang for a Black American; c) the hindquarters
of a small dog. It is in fact, though unexplained, a Southern boys'
‘pet' name.) There are many scenes involving all three actors,
and dialogues between all. Not, perhaps, enough soliloquy, which might
have helped explore character more intently. Everything being
interaction, the material is limited, at least early on (which drags
somewhat) by the articulacy or otherwise of the threesome, the paucity
of each character's imagination. In a way that's the point; in a way it
hinders. The cast's entrances, visually at least, are uninteresting, partly due to any salient design features in John Lee Beatty's plain set, but also to some lack of directorial flair. A single wide stairway, rear stage right, adds nothing By the end, the characters have aged a quarter of a century; their movement alters accordingly (Miss Daisy's rather well). But they are still plodding around much as they did at the outset. If the designer intended us to imagine the mansion's scale and dimensions, he was right: that's what we have to do. The action hots up at Hoke's job interview with
the son, and for two reasons. The first is the delightful way with which
they (inevitably, the son being Jewish liberal minded) discover
affinities (Hoke has driven for a judge, a friend of their family; but
more importantly, he is a man who knows his mind, and proudly says so,
earning respect), and thus after some awkwardness rapidly ‘click': did
Werthan's parents' household have black ex-slave retainers?
A further reason is that Werthan (a not uncommon
Jewish business name: there is still a conglomeration in It is the maybe-maybe not, will they/won't they,
the gradual freeing up of the relationship with Miss Daisy, that creates
the entertainment, and the charm, of the play. Not the drama. Because we
know that she will, in fact, succumb, there is a dimension missing form
this play as surely as it can be lacking, or subordinated, in costume
drama. There is no Miller element, no deep-seated tension that reveal
the unexpected. No undercurrents to illustrate back up or challenge the
bagel society. It is this delightful inevitability, the fruition of
their relationship that woos and wins audiences. For me, it is a
disaster and a disappointment. But let us not cavil. So beautifully honed is
Warrington's performance (before closure, he was seen in the Birmingham
Rep's The Merchant of Venice), his subtle changes of mood, the
hunched stance yet staunchly upright, shoulders-back walk, the
inflection of his voice with its high pitch, interrogative lilt (all, a
friend advised me, characteristic of the Southern black: the obligatory
marks of deference) that he engages us at every turn.
Yet perhaps not at the outset. Esbjornson has
Hoke deliver his first responses facing upstage; it would have been so
easy to switch it – Hoke's chair and Werthan's desk - the other way
round. Before you get used to his gentle drawl, it's tricky to catch
every word. Yet this initial problem mostly wafts away; Don Warrington's Hoke had a social as well as physical journey to travel What renders the set, or rather the setting, so
atmospheric is the rear-projection (designed originally for Later in Harrington's impactful scenic backdrops
we will see Corinthian columned churches and meeting halls, the
hilariously names Piggly-Wiggly superstore (the first of Miss Daisy's,
at first reluctant, sorties with Hoke); and at a key moment, one of the
last speeches of Martin Luther King. This kind of animated cyclorama –
surreal in its way, but never fazing an audience - works wonders here: a
play very much dependent on context (over 25 years) is located in real
time. Gwen Taylor's Daisy Werthan is a picture of a
character. Still strong and determined, in the swingaround of
generations, not to be overborne by her son (‘Quit talking so ugly
to your mother'; ‘I'm not prejudiced, can't you understand?'),
she unhesitatingly – not entirely inaccurately - accuses Hoke of theft
(‘a tin of salmon') before he turns the tables by producing a replica
and explaining the cause of the disappearance. She moves well; by old
age her legs are puffy (and surely padded out?), her gait arthritic.
There is not enough discovery in her performance, which goes as far as
the script but no further, to make it a great one; but it is a very good
one, and she entertains hugely. The script seems variable, and at times slow:
there are lines kept in that could easily be dispensed with – this is
not Miller, who has the tautness of Greek tragedy; it lacks the impact
of Williams; and it lacks, on the whole, the poetry of either. Yet other
passages are really telling, as, for example, when Hoke explains, put on
the spot, that he cannot read, or when he described, later, a racist
lynching, or the potential for another even now.
If the play does have force, it is that one
senses a dual, or even triple, tragic undercurrent: that of black
discrimination and oppression; the Jewish pogroms and diaspora that
brought the Werthans' forebears to the States; and the economic disaster
of the great Wall Street crash.
None is explored, except perhaps the first, with
any depth; even the McCarthy era passes unnoticed (did it affect East
and West but not South?) It is impossible to expect a play spanning 25
years of history to treat it all – the Cold War, Alabama's Governor
Wallace, the Kennedy killing; but by the time Daisy is 89 (January,
1965) it is not unreasonable to expect those integral to the play and
its central characters to have been teased out with greater subtlety and
insight. Ian Porter's Boolie character is mixed: unprepossessing, yet put upon (his mother bickers with him as an adult but treats him as a child; perhaps the way most mothers do). He brings good touches – some of his (onstage) phone calls are amusing, one with his Secretary, a Miss McLatchy, especially so. We do not see the businessman, which one
well-crafted short speech might have supplied (the interview with Hoke
in his office is a different matter). Thus Boolie remains a cipher: part
amiable, part brisk, part bumbling.
Yet when he tells Hoke at the end, when Miss
Daisy, now in a home, is no longer there to drive, ‘Your check is going
to keep coming,' the generosity and gratitude is typical of Boolie's
nature. There is a definite, and welcome, element of noblesse oblige.
It is the potential philanthropy of wealth, and the richness of bonding
over time, that Porter captures particularly well. Still, it is The ‘driving' scenes, on a makeshift bench or a
hilariously circling floor device, are, true to the title, a delight.
But when, almost an hour and a half into the play, Hoke sits next to
Miss Daisy for the first time, and (you feel it coming) Daisy takes his
hand - ‘Hoke, you're my best friend' - you feel the build-up has been
long but slight. There has been no real growth to this moment; it sounds
merely like a sigh of old age: soppy, sentimental, and despite audience
oohs and ahhs, only mildly touching. But Daisy has spirit even now. ‘Hoke came to see
me, not you,' she tells her loquacious son at the retirement home.
Whatever its limitations, the second half of Uhry's Driving Miss
Daisy in infinitely superior to the first.
And these final scenes epitomise the pair's
finest dramatic touch: the silences. It is the haltingness of
conciliation, the slow plod of coming to terms, the tentativeness of
embrace, that they intermittently capture so well. Gwen Taylor, it could
be argued, has enough of the Wendy Hiller-Vanessa Redgrave ingredients
to be on the way to a great performance.
Driving Miss Daisy is at the Swan Theatre,
High Wycombe 2-6 April and the Grand Theatre,
**** ALTHOUGH this warm-hearted play is based
during a period of major social change in America and at the height of
the civil rights movement, it does not try to deliver any fundamental
racial message to the audience. Rather it shows the genuine mutual affection that
develops between Miss Daisy Werthan, a wealthy Jewish widow living in
Georgia, and the veteran black chauffeur her son appoints in
1948 because he fears his 72-year-old mother's driving is no longer up
to scratch. Gwen Taylor, herself a spritely 74-year-old whose
acting career included a spell as Anne Foster in Coronation Street, is a
delight as Daisy, perfectly reflecting her prickly reluctance to be
replaced by anyone at the wheel of her own car. So at first she gives a frosty reception to
kindly Hoke Coleburn who, however, soon proves he is capable of coping
with her moods which reach a crisis when she thinks, wrongly, that he
has stolen a tin of salmon. Don Warrington, who played Philip Smith in the TV
hit Rising Damp, gives a quality performance in the role of Hoke. Never
overawed by his difficult boss, he earns her respect to the extent that,
in a touching scene late on, she pats him gently on the hand and admits
"Your are my best friend". Their friendship lasted to her 90th year when
she was wheelchair-bound in a home for the elderly. Ian Porter also impresses as Daisy's businessman
son whose decision to turn down an invitation to accompany Daisy to a
Martin Luther King banquet because of the affect it might have on his
company shows the undercurrent of racial concerns in the area. Paul Marston
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