Rupert Brooke
Production: Rupert Brooke
Venue: York Theatre Royal
Rating: ***
First performed last year, Mark Payton’s play about one of the most celebrated War poets returned to the York Theatre Royal this weekend on Remembrance Sunday, three days before the ninetieth anniversary of the armistice. Yet, despite the solemnity the occasion inspires, the one-man show is surprisingly comic. It is warm-hearted towards its subject, and by choosing to make its portrait of Rupert Brooke as personal and human as possible avoids hagiography, the play allows the audience’s common sense to appreciate the tragedy of the era, instead of having it preached to them.
Without doubt, this is helped by the fact that Brooke wasn’t actually killed in combat; at the age of 28, he died of blood poisoning onboard a ship sailing the Aegean Sea in 1915, not long after his most famous poem of self-sacrifice, The Soldier, had reached England. The already well-known figure’s fame would immediately explode as he came to represent the national idealism of the country during the war’s early stages: hence the later preference for poets such as Owen and Sassoon, who underwent the brutality of the trenches.
Payton, who discovered the poet as an English student, presents the man through his poems and letters, as Brooke recalls his memories of the early twentieth century; he skinny-dipped with Virginia Woolf, socialised with the Fabians and discovered America. The understood need to fight the war is presented as an antidote to Brooke’s frustrations with British society, and as an inevitable consequence of his unstable love-life.
Jonathan Race’s performance tended to exhibit an overly palpable wide-eyed wonder at the recollection of Brooke’s exotic travels and study at Cambridge, matching the unsubtle string music the production featured. But this did correspond well to the overall enthusiasm of the character’s sociability, and to the boyishness Race adopted to play a symbol of youth. Payton’s strategy succeeded in making it difficult to distinguish his words from Brooke’s, though the play frustratingly avoided exploring the poet’s bisexuality when remembering lost loves. Instead, Juliet Forster’s staging – featuring a grand memorial plaque but minimal props – stressed both the heroic labels that loomed over him and his endearing everyman qualities. The knowledge we now have about Brooke is seen as a counter-narrative to hero worship, and yet doesn’t seem to be fully explored.
Rupert Brooke was performed at York Theatre Royal 8-9th November
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