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Honour by Joanna Murray-Smith
AUSTRALIAN playwright Joanna Murray-Smith’s play Honour, written in 1995 when she was a mature student on a Columbia University writing programme, was performed at the National Theatre London six years ago, where it delighted the critics.
It’s not the sort of play you expect to see on a Saturday afternoon in the Tivoli Theatre in Wimborne, performed by an amateur company.
But when that company is Churchill Productions, which in its ten years’ existence has established a reputation for versatility and exceptional acting, this difficult and painful play is in safe hands.
It charts the breakdown of a seemingly airtight marriage, as distinguished literary journalist George falls for a bright 28-year- old graduate sent to interview him for a book of profiles.
Like so many men (and women) before and after him, he justifies this sudden and unexpected revival of a passion of which he had forgotten any inkling as LOVE, and in a telling exchange explains just why the “heart” takes precedence over all else, in a painful euphemism.
There are no spare lines in this play, which is performed in short scenes between George, his wife of 32 years Honor, their daughter, 24-year-old Sophie, and Claudia the new lover.
It is a brilliant dissection of a relationship whose cracks are only noticed in retrospect by one party.
At the same time it trumpets the old adage “women beware women” as what starts out as a brilliant manipulation of Honour by Claudia turns into a clinical out trumping by the older, more experienced woman who has spotted a chink in what seems to be the solid armour of her rival.
The play calls to mind Stoppard’s The Real Thing and Pinter’s Betrayal, but this one is written by a woman who is said to have called on her own experiences to create these painfully realistic characters.
It calls for powerful and uncompromising acting and Pete Talman’s skillful directing brings out the very best in a cast led by the excellent Jan Wyld as Honor, the woman who has abandoned her promising career to cherish, defend and care for her self-aggrandising husband, and has to find a strength she never suspected she would need.
John Billington is the selfish and ultimately distraught George, Kate Billington the furious, confused and abandoned Sophie and Emily MacGregor perfectly capturing the intellectually arrogant and deeply damaged and damaging Claudia.
It’s a hard play, stunningly performed by four actors at the height of their powers.
—G. P. W.
