Lawrence After Arabia - Howard Brenton

I found this perfectly pleasant, the way I find Michael Portillo on a train ‘pleasant’ or those bits where Tim Wonnacott does the history of antiques ‘pleasant’. There’s been a recent subgenre of dull historical footnote plays (Peter and Alice, The Moderate Soprano) and this absolutely towed that line, but for all that it was fairly bland, talky and ploddy, I really couldn’t hate this like some of you did, I really couldn’t get worked up by it, and I really couldn’t take against its passable passivity. It’s not a great play, but it manages to be an interesting enough couple of hours. Admittedly, that’s not good enough to schedule an evening around, but it’s not terrible, it’s not hateful, and somehow it’s not boring.

This is a play of facts and little more, and most of the facts Brenton chose makes for a pleasant education. There is something interesting in Lawrence and Faisal, and there is something interesting in the way Lawrence edited and fictionalised his legacy, and there is something interesting in Lawrence’s ‘backing into the limelight’. There was nothing revelatory to the drama, and nothing inventive in how Brenton told these facts; he just edited the truth down to some interesting bits and wrote well enough to engage me as a Sky Arts documentary does. It may not be great drama, but it's not awful. I also felt that Jack Laskey was utterly brilliant in this, beautifully showing Lawrence’s contradictory self-satisfaction, his rank sincerity, and his thin skin, making for an always compelling and occasionally very movingly hero.

However, it’s the facts and inane trivia that hold this back.  Amidst a relatively interesting if basic biography, there’s also yet another attempt to make too much of a historical footnote. It’s two unlikely friends, unlikely trivia, and that a play doth not make. As with Peter and Alice, I got the impression the playwright found a little-known historical meeting between two noteable heroes, tried to write their Travesties, and then realised there wasn’t any plot to this odd meeting yet were too far in to stop. Peter and Alice was atrocious and this wasn’t, but it’s the same problem of the truth going nowhere plotwise. Shaw himself, much as Rawle gives an engaging enough buoyant performance, doesn’t make for that compelling a character, at least under Brenton’s pen: dictating his plays, upholding his politics and eating carrot cake are quirks that don’t work, not characteristics. Lawrence being an inspiration for Joan is interesting enough, as a footnote, but Brenton mishandled this insight, both expecting too much of our knowledge of Saint Joan and showing too little of how Lawrence actually inspired lines and scenes in the play. It helps that Lawrence is an intrinsically interesting man (though there’s something really underwhelming, knowing the film’s on DVD, in having the characters talk about how stunning the march across the desert and attack on Aqaba is when I can see that stunningly myself!), but too much of this is as entertaining as reading Lawrence’s Wikipedia page – the facts are there, and the facts are fine, but I do expect a drama and this rehearsed reading of Wikipedia isn’t it. There’s also that tendency these plays have to have characters tell each other who they are too often, and I’ll eat my hat if there’s a better line this year than “But you founded the London School of Economics!”

And tantalisingly, I think Brenton has a play he really, really wants to write about our Empire’s legacy and the lines we draw (another play about this) which is all too held back by the biography. There are hints that there’s a well-researched and passionate play about these issues – not necessarily a great play, and clearly a biased play, but there are flashes of passion (mostly in Laskey’s eyes) that suggest Brenton should have cut the carrot cake and stuck to the desert. Yes, there’s something incredibly obvious (in a lesser director’s hands, patronising) about Lawrence virtually turning to us and repeating “Iraq, Syria, Palestine” to make his point about the legacy of our line-drawing, but because of Brenton’s sincerity, and because of Jack Laskey’s conviction in every line, it’s one of few moments where the play stops being pleasant and starts being passionate. Similarly, I think that the fury at colonial authority Laskey rails with is only possible because of the fury at colonial authority Brenton writes with Lawrence’s conviction in his pen. In Lawrence, Brenton has clearly found a political surrogate through whom he can speak about how maps being drawn can lead to wars, but to oversell this would mean risking inaccuracy; I wish Brenton was a more playful, more political, more partisan playwright willing to do so. Lawrence meeting Bernard Shaw’s a tiny piece of trivia, but Lawrence’s perceived betrayal by his country and class is drama, and when Brenton gets over the trivial facts, he hints at the angry political play he really wants to write – not a perfect play, but I’d rather see imperfect political passion than perfect factual accuracy. The elements are there, and it’s that which stops this from being another Moderate Soprano, but this ends up sacrificing passion for biography, and it’s that which stops this from being another Romans in Britain.

There’s a worthwhile if OTT play about military legacy, both regarding celebrity and cartography, lurking within this. There’s also a Wikipedia entry, and that’s nine tenths of this. Brenton chose a Wikipedia entry that is intrinsically dramatic, and didn’t over-focus on the footnote of the Lawrence/Shaw friendship, so mostly this was a pleasant plod through basic facts, and I can’t say I found the factual as dry or bad as other recent biographical plays. However, this only really came to life when Brenton took off the white gloves of the historian and stopped pulling his punches about what mattered to him, and those scenes of Laskey’s horror at his superiors, that scene of Laskey coming to terms with editing the past, in those was the contentious, convincing play Brenton wanted to write and I wanted to see. Instead, we have a history lesson, but at least it was an entertaining history lesson. I couldn’t recommend anyone part with money to see this, but hey, I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it at the time. And regardless, Laskey gave a real star turn in this.