“Arbitrary and irrelevant” was the Manchester Guardian’s view on John Betjeman, whose crisp verse detailed a vanishing England of buttered toast, country churches and suburban tennis clubs, when he was appointed poet laureate in 1972. You might say the same about this one-man show by Hugh Whitemore, performed by Edward Fox.
It’s a labour of love. But Whitemore’s script, which has none of the depth and detail of Stevie, his cleverly constructed bio-drama about the poet Stevie Smith, along with Fox’s often strangulated, monotonous vocal delivery, and Gareth Armstrong’s bland, static staging, could all do with some love of a tougher variety. And a kick up the theatrical backside. It’s all so tediously tasteful: Fotini Dimou’s Homes and Gardens design offers an English garden of tumbled leaves and a permanently soft-hued autumn. The poetry is perfectly pleasant, often deliciously witty, particularly if – like Betjeman – you believe that “poetry should always rhyme”. But it makes incredibly dull theatre.
Fox may not physically resemble Betjeman, but he captures his sweet sense of fun and, when given the chance, demonstrates that he can do more than sit in a chair, cuddle a teddy bear and look glum. After the interval, The Town Clerk’s Views is delivered with a bluff Yorkshire accent and a twinkle in the eye. Fox brings A Subaltern’s Love Song and famed Miss Joan Hunter Dunn to vivid life. Apparently, she really existed and was the deputy manager of catering at the ministry where Betjeman worked during the war. “She was marvellous at first aid – I used to wish desperately for a small wound.”
The show is often best when Betjeman is at his most self-deprecating, but he remains emotionally elusive as Whitemore hurtles through the biographical detail. It’s like Radio 4’s Poetry Please with added gossip and name-dropping: CS Lewis (his reviled Oxford tutor), Evelyn Waugh (who tempted the high-Anglican Betjeman’s wife to Rome), WH Auden (the pair went “church crawling” together) all get name checked. There is a dinner party in 1951 where Anthony Blunt (who was at Marlborough with Betjeman) gets increasingly agitated at the non-appearance of Guy Burgess, who is at that moment on his way to Moscow.
You can’t help warm to a man who, with fellow poets Auden and Louis MacNeice, penned the succinct erotic ditty: “Sometimes I think that I should like / To be the saddle on a bike.” But the aura of melancholy yearning for an England that gave such privilege to men of Betjeman’s class begins to grate, particularly when the anecdotes turn to stories about a house guest who goes out and “shoots the peasants”. It doesn’t make you nostalgic for Betjeman’s vanished England, but makes you wonder why it took so long to pass.
• At Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London, until 3 June. Box office: 020-7930 8800. Then touring until 15 July.
