Making Dickie Happy Reviews
The Guardian Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Jeremy Kingston's wittily ingenious play might once have found favour in the West End. Today it gets its premiere in a north London pub theatre, where it is briskly directed by Robert Gillespie and offers some tart, amusing comments on life, love, art and the problems of self-fulfilment.
Kingston seizes on the fact that Agatha Christie, Noel Coward and Dickie Mountbatten all severally holidayed at the same hotel in Devon. So he brings them together for a weekend and allows their varied visions of life to intersect. Christie, although temporarily in flight from her husband, believes squarely in marital fidelity. Coward feigns sexual insouciance but is racked when his latest lover threatens to leave him. And Mountbatten, enjoying a last fling with a naval chum, hovers uncertainly on the brink of marriage to Edwina.
Much of the play consists of camp chat conducted over cocktails and nuts; when Coward is in full spate, you get a heady mix of pastiche and pistachios. But Kingston raises serious issues, especially in a duel between Coward and Christie. "Let me come to your point," Coward tells Agatha; she is trying to say that Dickie - because of his fury over the ostracism of his Germanic father, his improbable marriage and his ideas about building a whodunnit around an unreliable narrator - combines all the ingredients of betrayal.
Coward suavely suggests that we each have to make our own accommodation with the demands of love and life and, in the end, "dread nought". I don't buy Kingston's criticism that the early work of Christie and Coward lacked, respectively, "credible emotion" and "passion". Coward, after all, went on to write The Vortex. But Kingston's play is full of sharp dialogue and perceptively suggests that our moral codes are based on our personal preferences. Robert Forknall excellently conveys Coward's love for machine-gun epigrams, while Caroline Wildi smoothly evokes the young Christie's ethical probity and Hywel John's bisexual Dickie is appropriately tricky.
Michael Billington.
Evening Standard Tuesday, 14 September 2004
Nicholas de Jongh
ALL the unlikely threesome of Agatha Christie, Noel Coward and Lord Mountbatten can have had common is an exotic Devon hotel.
They are known to have visited it in the Twenties, though not together. Stirred by this snippet of information Jeremy Kingston's imagination has run wild and witty in his brooding comedy of love and misunderstanding that draws this unlikely trio together then pushes them apart.
Mrs Christie appears uneasily alone and staying under the protection of a pseudonym, as if in dress rehearsal for a later nervous breakdown, while Coward and Mountbatten are amply accompanied. The mood is delightfully rarefied. People of several sexual persuasions appear in Kevin Freeman's cream-and-pink art deco reception room and need little persuading. They speak in well-heeled, even stiletto tones: Coward's diction isnot so much clipped as shorn. Kingston's clever dialogue polishes innuendo until it sparkles. People exchange aphorisms.No one drops a cliché not even the sexy waiter (Rob Pomfret) who offers bons mots, cocktails and his lips to two grand, male guests.
Coward, played by over-mature Robert Forknall with a ridiculous floral buttonhole and a camp manner that is too hectic and hectoring, has David Peto's smooth Lordly lover, Tono, for amusement. Mountbatten, nervously poised weeks away from marriage to Edwina, keeps in tow J-Boy, a handsome nautical chum who may be more than just chummy and a signal of the future Supreme Military Commander's undercover bisexuality.
Kingston, a times theatre critic as well as a playwright, concocts a plot more contrived and less lucid than his fine dialogue. Caroline Wildi's Mrs Christie oddly warns Hywel John's stiff, pompous Mountbatten about the dangers of his marrying and not being true to himself, while he urges upon her a new form of detective-story writing. Coward, who takes a lofty view of other love-lives, finds he has been taken for a ride.
The plot-lines in Robert Gillespie's production are scrambled, but the atmospheric comedy of repartee and ambivalence seduces.
The Daily Telegraph, 28.9.2004
What larks when Noël met Louis and Agatha
JEREMY Kingston is a highly readable and delightfully idiosyncratic theatre critic on The Times. Every now and again, however, he bravely sticks his head above the parapet and turns playwright himself.
The genesis of Making Dickie Happy was his discovery that Noël Coward, Louis Mountbatten and Agatha Christie frequented the same hotel in Devon, a luxurious establishment on an island cut off by high tides. Kingston imagines what might have happened if they had all stayed there together in the early 1920s, when all three were at the start of their careers.
The result is a witty collision of characters in a sugar-spun comedy boasting a succession of deliciously camp one-liners. Agatha Christie is in retreat from her first unhappy marriage, though still believing passionately in fidelity. A bisexual Mountbatten is enjoying a last fling with a fellow sailor before marrying his rich heiress, Edwina Ashley. Coward has an aristocratic boyfriend in tow, Tono, for whom he feels more than his mask of witty detachment allows him to express.
There is a good deal of clenched and entertaining chat - on art, on love, and their frequently troubled relationship with truth. Christie is appalled, for instance, when Mountbatten suggests the deeply devious plot of what was to become her classic, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, believing that any man who could imagine such a twist must be dangerously unreliable.
My chief quibble about the play is that it's all talk and no plot, and Kingston might profitably have combined his light but penetrating comedy in the Coward manner with the kind of Agatha Christie detective story to which the drama's setting seems so ideally suited.
Robert Gillespie's production is sometimes a touch strident, but there's a stylish Art Deco design by Kevin Freeman, and impressive performances from Robert Forknall as a Coward who manages to be both obnoxiously superior and unexpectedly touching, and from Caroline Wildi as the decent, troubled Christie. With a few star names and a stiffening of the narrative, this intriguing play could well have a life beyond the fringe.
Charles Spencer
The Stage Online
SQUARING UP TWO LEGENDARY BUT CONTRASTING CREATIVE MINDS IS THE PRETEXT FOR JEREMY Kingston's quick-witted new play.
It is essentially a good excuse for the playwright to conjure up an absorbing fictional shindig of sharp tongues and camp, caustic wit. Set with the First World War still a recent memory, Noel Coward and his boyfriend Tono, Agatha Christie, 'Dickie' Mountbatten and a navy chum all converge at the same hotel on Burgh Island in Devon - what follows is an interesting study of strained relationships and suppressed sexuality.
The undoubted key to the success of this production is Robert Forknall's mesmerising portrayal of the young Coward. He shifts with ease from playful sparring to an acid tongue, from exuberant banter to melancholy and anger - it is a captivating portrait of Coward as a wise fool.
Caroline Wildi's Christie is a rather more withdrawn figure whose quiet intelligence contrasts with the boisterous antics of the men around her. As sexually confused Mountbatten, Hywel John gives a lighter comic air to proceedings, despite the shadow of an undesired marriage hanging over him. David Peto, Rob Pomfret and Matt Reeves all give assured, essentially supporting performances.
Robert Gillespie's direction alternates the pacing of the dialogue well, while Kevin Freeman's set and Stephen Ley's lighting do what is required but little more. One criticism is the rather poorly mimed piano playing by several cast members - but this is a minor flaw in a stylish production.
Dominic Martin
Review: Timothy Ramsden, reviewsgate.com
Wit and style in a handsome, well-paced production.
The dark chamber of the Rosemary Branch seems to have expanded into the creamy affluence of a 1920s Devon hotel lounge to match the sophisticated, elegant wit of Jeremy Kingston's look at the gay monde headed by 'Dickie' Mountbatten, royal by lineage, and Noel Coward, imperial in manner.
Holidaying with their slick-hair boyfriends, they enter and leave as the turn of elegant conversation requires. Meanwhile these companions, less prominent characters both, eye up the waiter, whose perfect poise combines subservience of behaviour with superiority of demeanour to suggest a youthfully subversive scion of the house of Jeeves.
There's no pretence of realism - the prop piano which several characters strum ensures that. Except for the sole female character: handbag-toting, ever so slightly anguished 'tec writer Agatha Christie. Padding around solo, without the protective glaze of ironic sophistication, she's outraged by Dickie. Not his behaviour with the boys, perfectly proper throughout (this man is going to run a war in Burma and organise India's independence, gaining Gandhi's respect in the process).
No, it's the plot he offers her for a novel, which breaks every convention between mystery writer and reader. And whether any Dickie, upper case or lower, ever gets happy, betrayal's in the air. Mountbatten senior, Britain's First Sea Lord, had to change his name from its Germanic original in 1914; sounding Teutonic in the Great War made one seem unreliable. His father thus mistrusted by the nation, Dickie now joins the bright, glad confident generation of the famous let down by their lovers.
All in a world where people still seek harmony. Agatha once put Debussy in his place by demanding music resolve concordantly; at a moment of emotional fury Noel bangs the piano keyboard mercilessly before thinning the chords into a pert music-hall song.
It's performed with alacrity and style, if not universal subtlety and variation. Yet Wildi's Agatha successfully suggests other concerns within, as if far away on an evidence trail like her fictional sleuth Poirot, while Robert Forknall's Noel has a dashing authority that powers his moment of emotional vulnerability. Dashed jolly stuff all round, I'd say.
Camden New Journal 16 September 2004
by RICHARD HODKINSON
MAKING Dickie Happy evokes the brittle, brilliant world of England's literary and social elite in the years following World War I - and does it brilliantly.
The Times theatre critic Jeremy Kingston has crafted a fictional meeting between Noel Coward, the young Lord 'Dickie' Mountbatten and Agatha Christie, as the celebrated trio find themselves facing decisive moments in their lives.
Ensconced in an island hotel off the Devon coast, Mountbatten is part of the glamorous coterie of young men who occupy an orbit around Coward. They are mostly flamboyantly homosexual, except poor Dickie, who is ambivalently homosexual and, in any case, about to tie the knot with potentially disastrous results.
At least, this is the opinion of Agatha Christie, who expresses to Coward her fear that the British Empire may fall if Dickie is allowed to climb into bed with a woman. Noel himself has his hands full with a flighty boyfriend Tono, and the dramatis personae is completed by Dickie's pal and fellow sailor (that's 'sailor' as in 'hello, sailor') J-Boy and eye-candy waiter Cyril, who delivers more than pink gin to the male members of the party.
The thematic strands that Kingston works into his plot are harder to follow than the sexual proclivities of the characters, however. This is true to the extent that the audience often seems to be watching six characters in search of a plot. But, my God, those characters talk entertainingly while they're looking.
Kingston's triumphant achievement is in writing Cowardian dialogue that is as whimsical and appears as effortless as that produced by the man himself. Like Coward's own stage works, Making Dickie Happy doesn't trouble itself too much with elaborate storylines or complex structures. It works as a series of fantastically well-written conversations in which the protagonists spar eloquently with language as finely honed as it is funny.
It takes a fine cast, of course, to deliver such a script with conviction. Robert Forknall is quite the waspish Coward of the imagination and he is well supported by David Peto as Tono. Hywel John as Mount-batten doesn't manage to capture the accent or the arrogance of the man, but an outstanding performance comes from Caroline Wildi as a touchingly vulnerable Agatha Christie, whose conventional decency contrasts with the hedonistic instincts of the male characters.
The Independent
Jeremy Kingston's wonderfully witty and wily play brings together, as guests in the same Devon hotel, a youthful Noel Coward, Dickie Mountbatten (about to wed Edwina), and Agatha Christie, who is playing temporary hookey from hubby.
The result, which ingeniously uses bizarre biographical facts, is a tart, entertaining disquisition on “the marrying kind” and on the link between reliable conventions in art and life. In Robert Gillespie's stylish production, Hywel John is deliciously funny as snobbish, bisexual Dickie.
Time Out
An imagined encounter between Noel Coward, Agatha Christie, and Lord Mountbatten on an island off the coast of Devon was the inspiration for this neat, terribly old-fashioned play by Jeremy Kingston.Their meeting is the stuff of drama, all on the cusp of such wildly different careers, and struggling to meld them with fraught personal lives.
The first half of Kingston's play does a fine job of illustrating as much, though the tone is all Coward's: no-one takes off their masks, everyone speaks in clipped epigrams, and all of them, save Christie, are gay. The problem of the title is that Mountbatten insists he is the 'marrying kind', despite the mounting evidence to the contrary.
Robert Gillespie's direction is in keeping with the spirit of the play; the action takes place in a single room of the hotel, and the characters are marshalled into neat rows from which to speak their sculpted lines. Some of them, particularly those of Robert Forknall's Coward, are superb, which is what lends this well-tuned piece its considerable charm. Hywel John is a winning, charmingly aristocratic Mountbatten, and Caroline Wildi delivers a finely tortured Christie, unsure of whether to save her writing or her marriage.
But Kingston can't help himself from forcing his characters into completely untenable positions in the second half, where they all propound impossibly pat psychological profiles of each other, or predict the future with uncanny accuracy. It's a shame, because this quirky drama consequently degenerates into something of an expositional rant from a group of stilted characters, robbed of their inner reality and human interest.
Lucy Powell
Sam Marlowe
THIS new play by The Times theatre critic Jeremy Kingston is nothing if not elegant. Brimming with bons mots and clever conceits, it was inspired by the playwright's stay in an Art Deco hotel on a tiny island off the Devon coast, and his discovery that, in the past, it had played host to a number of famous guests.
Kingston blends fact and fiction to engineer a chance meeting there, in the early 1920s, between Agatha Christie, Noel Coward and Louis "Dickie" Mountbatten, and uses the real-life connections between them to explore the themes of love, treachery and the relationship between art and life.
History records that Mountbatten and Coward were, indeed, friends. More intriguingly, it was Dickie who suggested to Christie a new idea for a whodunnit: that the narrator of the tale should turn out to be the killer. The novelist later employed the device in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Here, she is horrified by what she perceives as the immorality of deceiving her readers — mainly because she has recently discovered that she, herself, is the victim of deception by her philandering husband — and sees in Mountbatten's notion the seeds of a future betrayal of Britain. Coward, meanwhile, views his friend's impending marriage of convenience as a betrayal of self.
It's all very neat, and, in Robert Gillespie's attractive production, on the whole well executed. Caroline Wildi's isolated Agatha plays Schumann on the hotel piano as if it were a purgative form of therapy. And as Coward, Robert Forknall suggests a longing for love beneath his glittering aphorisms. Hywel John is less convincing as Mountbatten, but then his is the least interesting of the three characters — and that is the play's greatest problem.
Kingston makes Dickie sexually confused, and bitterly resentful of the way in which the Royal Navy turned its back on his father because of the First World War due to his German origins — yet he doesn't endow him with enough depth or complexity to make us care much about him. Similarly, Noel's boyfriend, Dickie's Navy friend and Cyril the dashing waiter are all so underwritten as to be almost superfluous. But the play is often deliciously witty, as when Forknall's Coward subjects an uncomfortable Christie to a spot of Freudian analysis or when he summons Cyril with a flirtatious twitch of his lips. And Kevin Freeman's set, with its voluptuous pastel nudes and Charles Rennie Mackintosh-style decor, is impeccably tasteful. Making Dickie Happy may be a little short on substance, but it has plenty of style.
Evening Standard Thursday, 23 September 2004. Londoner’s Diary
Having a gay, royal time
MAKING DICKIE Happy, a play by Times theatre critic Jeremy Kingston, explores the bisexual frolics of the young Lord 'Dickie' Mountbatten, on the cusp of his marriage to Edwina Ashley.
So imagine the concern when the Mountbatten's two now elderly daughters, the 80-year-old Countess Mountbatten and 75-year-old Lady Pamela Hicks, were spotted in the audience at the Rosemary Branch Theatre in Islington. "I was a bit worried — at one point one of the characters calls Dickie a 'royal arsehole' — but they didn't seem to mind," Kingston tells me. "They had a very liberal upbringing and people were open minded in the 1920s. In fact they couldn't have been more charming. They told me their father wasn't gay but he did have a lot of gay friends."
The Camden Journal
‘Gay’ Louis play a hit with the Mountbattens
by RICHARD HODKINSON
THE CAST of a play about the homosexual inclinations of the late Lord Louis Mountbatten could have been forgiven for fluffing a few lines at their performance last Tuesday, when half the Mountbatten clan arrived unannounced to see the show. Keeping Dickie Happy, a fictionalised account of a meeting between Noel Coward, Agatha Christie and Lord 'Dickie' Mountbatten, received glowing reviews in this newspaper and the national press when it opened last week. In it, playwright Jeremy Kingston makes Mountbatten's alleged homosexuality and his impending marriage a central feature of the comedy.
Mountbatten's family has always denied suggestions that, as a former Viceroy of India and Chief of the Defence Staff, the Earl's early life was anything other than rigidly heterosexual. So, when both his daughters arrived at the Rosemary Branch Theatre, with five family members, the aphorism that 'the show must go on' felt less compelling than usual to members of the cast.
Go on it did, however, and to great acclaim from Countess Mountbatten, Lady Pamela Hicks and the assembled Brabournes and Knatchbulls, all descendents of the Earl, who asked to meet the cast after the performance. "They all left on frightfully good terms," said the Rosemary Branch's co-creative director Cecilia Darker, though, of course, they didn't accept the gay theory at all."
The play's author, who is also the theatre critic for The Times, happened to be at the Rosemary Branch for the performance.
"Poor Jeremy needed three whiskies before he could face them," said Ms Darker, "but they got on terribly well. Lady Pamela called the play 'a wonderfully imaginative extension of an idea', which was a most diplomatic way of saying she didn't think her father was gay, I suppose."
Hywel John, who plays Mountbatten in the production would have been thanking his lucky stars that he chose to play the Earl as dashing and forceful rather than overtly camp. He, too, was introduced to the family and was complimented both on his performance and on his Brompton folding bicycle, which, apparently, would have impressed Mountbatten. "Papa loved his gadgets," said the Countess. Mr John described the whole experience as "surreally enchanting".
Nonetheless, despite the radical democratic ideals traditional to Islington fringe theatre. Ms Darker and her co-creative director Cleo Sylvestre admit to having made concessions to the aristocratic pedigree of their guests. "Lady Pamela asked if we served dinner after the show which, of course, we don't," said Ms Darker. "But, of course, I said we do, so Cleo and I didn't see the second act of the play - we were in the kitchen cooking pasta for the Mountbattens."
The Guardian Saturday August 28 2004
It was 25 years ago yesterday that Lord Mountbatten was killed by the IRA at Mullaghmore in Co Sligo, along with his 14-year-old grandson and a 17-year-old local boatman. I detest political assassination, but Dickie Mountbatten deliberately put himself — and the teenage boys in his care — at risk.
The Gardai implored him not to come to Classiebawn: they had intelligence that he was a target. He arrogantly dismissed their warnings — he thought he was so "leftwing" and so "friendly" towards republicanism that they would never touch him. Not very bright, he didn't understand that the Provos didn't care whether a man read the New Statesman or not. He was a high-profile Brit and that was enough reason to knock him off.
Marking the 25th anniversary of his death, a new play about Mount-batten, by the Times critic Jeremy Kingston, is in rehearsal and will open on September 7. It's called Making Dickie Happy and it's about Mountbatten's relationship with Noel Coward, just before Dickie married Edwina Ashley in July 1922. "Mountbatten and his young companion, Jay-Boy, arrive for a weekend at a hotel off the coast of Devon," says Hywel John, the handsome young actor who is playing Dickie. "They meet Noel Coward with his companion, Lord Bungay."
An intense weekend follows in which "love and sexual identity and power" are at the centre of the encounter. Dickie confides his insecurities to Noel, including a discussion of Mountbatten's alleged bisexuality. At the end, Coward understands why Mountbatten has to marry (Edwina has £2m while Dickie's naval salary is £610 yearly) but feels he should be honest about his gay side too. Should be fun. (The play is opening at the Rosemary Branch Theatre in Islington, with hopes for a West End transfer.) Incidentally, Andrew Roberts claims in his biographical study that Mountbatten wasn't bisexual. But never mind — Edwina was.
Mary Kenny.
New Statesman
A critic writes - It's not as easy as it looks. MICHAEL COVENEY on an attempt by a colleague to write a play.
Jeremy Kingston, an urbane and highly readable theatre critic on the Times, has written a play called Making Dickie Happy, about a fictional encounter in 1922 between Noel Coward, Agatha Christie and Lord ("Dickie") Mountbatten.
The piece, being staged at the Rosemary Branch Theatre on the border between Hackney and Islington in north London, is quite fun, if a little arch, and examines some sexual undercurrents and overtones on the eve of Dickie's marriage to Edwina, with Christie locked into her own creative mini-crisis and Coward stirring the cocktail, not to mention the cocktail waiter.
It is odd to find such a brittle, bohemian scenario in fringe theatre, and odder still to find it written by a critic - because critics are, by common definition, objective outsiders, naysayers, curmudgeons and apparently, in the recent words of A A Gill, "cliquey, partisan, grudging and star-struck".
So much for A A Gill. I'm with the late, great Coral Browne, who declared, on seeing a huge golden phallus wheeled on to the stage during the final dress rehearsal of Seneca's Oedipus at the Old Vic: "Well, it's nobody I know, ducky." Or perhaps, in this case, Dickie. Most critics I know are fairly well-adjusted, reasonably fulfilled individuals with a passion for theatre, but also for children, music, gardening, drinking, boating and horse-riding. And one or two of them even write plays.
The image is the opposite, I admit, of Robert Robinson's stereotype of the shop-soiled malcontent taking the last bus home to Muswell Hill. And while I do know of one or two critics who bear some vague grudge against the world because of a rejected manuscript or two, most of those who try to scratch out more than their columnar abrasions eventually achieve some satisfaction.
Yet, however unfair, the notion of the critic as artist manquè has a long and distinguished history. The late Hans Keller, a notable music critic, alleged that all critics evince negative fervour more easily than positive fervour, and he diagnosed the whole tribe as victims of J C Fluge's Polycrates Complex, "which drives us to find smallness in greatness: we do not readily allow man to presume above his station, and if he is a demonstrable genius, our only remaining hope is that as a person, as a human being, he was a nasty piece of work".
While such hatchet jobs as Paul Johnson's work on Brecht or Arianna Stassinopoulos's book on Picasso would seem to bear this out, a former colleague of Kingston's on the Times, Irving Wardle, suggested in his book on theatre criticism that bitterness is only half the story. His point was that critics are not "as good as" artists, but that their starting motive is the same: "They write notices, as other people write plays, because they can do it - not to work off the Polycrates Complex."
When I went to see Kingston's play, I happened to bump into Wardle. He wrote a very good play some years ago called The Houseboy - based on his sexually eye-opening experiences as a music student - and he told me that he is working on a book about the "artist type", the critic or participant with a taste for something he cannot quite manage himself. The greater the critic, the greater the poignancy of this. Tom Stoppard once said that he would as happily read Edmund Wilson on Sophocles as read Sophocles himself. Anatole France said that the life of a critic was a journey through masterpieces (if only!), and Orson Welles greeted the arrival of Kenneth Tynan, the greatest critic since George Bernard Shaw, with a robust seal of approval: "You know how to cheer, you are not afraid to hiss, you are audible (to put it mildly) and transparently in love."
Yet Tynan, the subject of a new play at the Royal Shakespeare Company (the second since he died in 1980), was never satisfied with being a great critic. Even as he started, in 1950, he said that "when maturity overtakes me, I shall have a great many less important but weightier things to do than sit trembling in theatres".
He was indeed a brilliant literary manager at the National Theatre; he produced the controversial nude revue Oh! Calcutta! (a disguised title - "Oh, quel cul t'as!" - that flattered his spanking habit); and he was arguably the best essayist in English on any subject since William Hazlitt.
But did any of that supersede his value and achievement as a theatre critic? No. It is the lot, and perhaps the tragedy, of the great critic to remain just that. William Archer, a friend of Shaw and critical champion of Ibsen, was not content with transforming the theatre of his day through impassioned argument. At the age of 63, an idea for a play came to him in a dream; the resultant melodrama, The Green Goddess, was a rollicking commercial hit, first on Broadway and then in the West End.
The only critics who have hit the jackpot recently are the poet James Fenton and the lyricist Herbert Kretzmer, both thanks to Les Miserables. Fenton wrote lyrics that were eventually discarded, but he retained a share of all box-office grosses, while Kretzmer - with a good track record of musicals such as Our Man Crichton and The Four Musketeers — finished the job. Oh, and Sheridan Morley has done very well out of his Noel Coward and Gertie Lawrence cabaret. So good luck to Kingston. With a less strenuous production and a bit of star casting, Making Dickie Happy could make Jeremy jolly, and perhaps a bit of lolly. But I reckon that in ten years' time, I'd still rather read his collected reviews than agitate for this play's revival in one of my own.