Monday, Feb. 25, 1985
Jeeves Vs. Zelda Tom and Viv
By RICHARD CORLISS
Some writers live off their work; others live in it. On the evidence of Michael Hastings' austere docudrama, Thomas Stearns Eliot--banker, publishing executive, playwright, premier poet of this century--passed his domestic life on automatic pilot, while his mind found refuge and flourished in the Waste Land. The play's Tom (Edward Herrmann) finds it "an enormous effort to be trivial" with people. He husbands his passion for the empty page. He is the hollow man, a prune and a prude with the secret sin of genius, which must not be dissipated in ordinary intercourse. This Olympian diffidence, Hastings suggests, was sufficient to make the young scholar from St. Louis a figure of fun to his English in-laws--and perhaps enough to drive his wife mad.
Vivienne Haigh-Wood (Julie Covington) was a young woman of good mind and high spirits when Eliot married her. The poet may even have loved Viv. Surely he loved the England she embodied--sturdy, demanding, eccentric, eloquent, experimenting within a noble tradition--qualiti es that informed his art, if not his personality. As for Viv, she must have been beguiled by the oddity of their coupling, his Jeeves to her Zelda, and by the challenge of unearthing the soul of a poet beneath the manners of a mortician.
Could this classic mismatch have worked? Probably not. He was ungiving, and she was too taking. Tom seemed most content playing bridge, in bowler and brolly, with his wife's mother (Margaret Tyzack) and brother (David Haig). Viv imagined herself, with a mixture of impishness and foreboding, as the mistress of Dr. Crippen, the Edwardian wife murderer. Nice judgment, that: Viv is the picturesque victim slipping into madness, and Tom is the deadly St. Eliot, ( condemned because he took advantage of a sinner.
Forbidden access to Eliot's papers, and permission to quote extensively from his work, Hastings is like a surgeon forced to operate in a straitjacket. So drudgy Tom sets the play's pace and defeats the efforts of Herrmann to animate this stick--a challenge not usually above him, as he demonstrated two years ago in Plenty, playing another man of propriety married to a disturbed idealist. Covington, Tyzack and Haig (imported from the Royal Court Theater in London, where Tom and Viv was first produced last year) perform admirably in better roles, ones with a little shading, irony and spunk. Max Stafford- Clark's direction fills the stage at Manhattan's Public Theater with mausoleum air and anguished pauses: if this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space.
Hastings might have found correspondences between Eliot's poetry and his frustrating family life. Or he might have had some fun and written a wicked expose. He has instead composed a dirge to incompatibility, which, because it raises expectations only to defeat them, leaves a taste of exhumed ashes.