Not Only Opera

Let’s talk about men: The Inheritance Part 1 at the Noël Coward Theatre

The Inheritance Part 1
Noël Coward Theatre
Grand Circle A23, £25
1 November 2018
Inheritance page

I’ve been reading A Dance to the Music of Time and enjoying for all its foibles its depictions of times gone. The first book conveys how weird it must have been when universities were all-male; such as in this sentence, an exchange between a professor, Sillery, and a student, Mark Members: ‘“I like my guests to feel at home, Mark,” said Sillery, recovering himself immediately, and playfully pinching the nape of Members’s neck between his finger and thumb, so that Members hunched his shoulders and squeaked shrilly.’ In later books the exclusively male environment of Oxford becomes the exclusively male environment of work, where men speak to men about men, the women with nothing to do but make homes and babies.

I thought of this at the beginning of Part 1 of The Inheritance. We seem to be in a creative writing class, but there are no women. Hmm, I think: E.M. Forster is there, so perhaps it’s supposed to be the 1950s or something; but then they are also using laptops… Hmm. By the end of Part 1 I know that this isn’t an exclusivity to depict a distant time, but the result of an artistic decision by writer Matthew Lopez to focus to the exclusion of all else on the experience of the modern American gay man. He as well as tells us as why when he chastises Forster, the play’s patron saint, for the lack of explicit gayness in the novels published in Forster’s lifetime. Maybe he has a point: there have been plenty of plays with no gay people in, despite the objective fact that homosexuality is a part of the human condition; why shouldn’t Lopez do his part of redressing the balance, by considering the modern American gay man to the exclusion of all other experiences?

But it’s 2018! Can’t we do better than that? What was distracting during watching (‘can really none of these men ever meet any women ever at all?’) becomes as I dwell on it depressing and annoying. Am I wrong to be so angered? I’m sure Lopez would virulently disagree but the introverted isolationism I see in Part 1 seems a mirror of the contemporary political events that Lopez so deplores. Trump says we must look after the white American man; Lopez responds that we must look after the gay American man. Are we so confined, that we can only look after those who are like ourselves? I hear Vanessa Redgrave is in Part 2, so perhaps there the other shoe will fall and I will see I’ve got myself in a pickle prematurely. But she and Lopez will have to do a lot to make me forgive such male exclusivity in Part 1.

So that’s the biggy. There is another artistic decision Lopez has made of which I’m also sceptical, in a less dramatic way. I assume the main reason for Forster’s presence as narrator and mentor is to tell us that the Forsterian foibles Lopez indulges himself in are conscious and therefore not to be criticised, that they are as essential to the character of his play as they are to Forster’s novels – their self-conscious structuring, their melodrama, their tidy novelistic encapsulation of people and their dilemmas, their guilty-pleasure indulgence in romance. I have affection for these in Forster; I’m not sure Lopez has earned the same. There’s even a Maurice-like wish-fulfilment, not around the freedom to love someone but the rather more prosaic question of property, the hero finding himself in successive possession of no fewer than three gorgeous New York estates through nothing more than good luck. What a hero!

The production is neat, the acting is excellent, the music is overblown but what you gonna do, as a whole production The Inheritance meets the deliriously high standards that seem to be today’s norm. Maybe Part 2 will make me think Lopez is worth it.