Following a highly acclaimed, sell-out run at the Finborough Theatre, the Two’s Company production of London Wall, by John Van Druten, transfers to the St. James Theatre next week. AYT’s Becky Brewis called in on Maia Alexander and Alix Dunmore in rehearsals. They talk about money, men and marriage…

Tell me a bit about the play

Dunmore: London Wall is essentially about what it was like to be a woman in the work place in the late 20s/early 30s, and how rubbish it was, frankly. All these women were dashing about, taking dictation, typing things, while the men were taking really long lunches and just sending them all over the place. If you weren’t born into money or a flirt (like Miss Bufton in the play) then your option was to get married as soon as possible in order to get out of work, because work was a complete drudge: you couldn’t earn enough money to buy your own property or anything like that.

My character is a senior secretary. She’s been there for 10 years and she’s earning three pounds a week which is the equivalent today of £150. In terms of spending power it was a bit more back then but still, given that she was there for 10 years, it was really not enough – especially given that she was basically running the joint.

What kind of relationship do your characters have?

Alexander: Miss Janus is like my guardian angel really, in the office. Both when I am there and when I’m not there she’s trying to steer my life so that it doesn’t replicate her life.

This production has been brilliantly received by critics and audiences, but how was the play received in 1931?

Dunmore: I think it went down really well. It was a bit of a staple – one of those plays that was always done for about five years but then disappeared off the radar. It’s interesting because it’s quite rare to find a play that’s got so many strong female characters in it and that it was written by a man, in 1931, is quite extraordinary.

Alexander: It’s interesting that people evidently wanted to come along in 1931 and watch a play about women  essentially being abused in the workplace, not just sexually abused but abused in terms of their rights and their pay.

Do you think London Wall still speaks to audiences in the same way it would have done originally, or is it enjoyed now more as a period piece?

Dunmore: A lot of people coming to see it have said “it’s terrible that we haven’t moved on as much as we should have” and “I’m listening to these women from 1931 speak and I have the same issues.” Yes, some bits are very dated but others are still so relevant to today.

Alexander: It’s funny because people were very split. A lot of people said exactly that, that it’s awful, but then a lot of people laugh at some of Miss Janus’s lines, like when she says “I’m 35!” as if to imply that she’s completely at the end of the road. People laugh at that kind of thing but I think a lot of the – dare I say it – the men in the audience tended to feel it was dated, whereas the women felt like it was very current and similar to their own situation, and their frustrations. 

How did you go about preparing for these parts?

Alexander: When I first read the play, my character just came across on the page as almost unbelievably naïve. I just couldn’t understand how somebody could be this naïve. So really it was a matter of  grounding her into what she really wanted and why she really wanted it. She’s an orphan, so I think a lot of what she wants comes from a real need for guidance, which is something that she gets from Miss Janus, and she just looks to this big authority figures as sort of parental figures.

Dunmore: Yeah. When we first rehearsed this we were all given assignments, to look at different aspects of the times, like film and theatre, makeup and hair, and how people lived. I looked into the money aspect and decided to immerse myself in the literature of the period, because I read a lot, so I read lots of Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh. And I found Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (which I’d never read before, to my shame) just – well if Miss Janus had had the money Virginia Woolf had, she’d have written that book, because Miss Janus is a fiercely intelligent person trapped in circumstances that are completely unfair, and Virginia Woolf sees all that, and questions why no one else is saying anything like this, and why women in universities have these terrible conditions, while the men are having steak for breakfast.

But these characters are written so well that it becomes easy. You just have to look at the text really to understand that person. It’s not like a Noël Coward play where you’ve got a lot of women that are cyphers for men, these are definitely women, so maybe Van Druton just had lots of strong women friends. 

Do you think it’s important for plays like this to be revived – to be performing old plays?

Alexander: Oh absolutely, and the success of the Finborough production speaks for itself. It is shocking to people in a way that, if it had been a play written about 1931 it wouldn’t be. But because it was written then, it shows how these issues were glaringly obvious even at the time.

Dunmore: The Orange Tree theatre pretty much constantly does plays of around this period and revives things that haven’t been done for a long time, and they get packed out, so there is a huge audience for it. And me personally as an actor, it’s definitely my period, ’30s and ’40s, I absolutely love it. I founded a theatre company called the Fitzrovia Radio Hour, where we are pretending we are a 1940s radio show, and make all the sound effects with props and stuff like that so yes, I can barely do a modern play now!

Do you think this could have been differently interpreted? Is this production quite true to how the play would originally have been performed?

Alexander: I think we have tried to make it as modern a thing as possible. I mean, Tricia [Thorns] didn’t want anyone doing old accents.

Dunmore: Yes, no really heightened RP, like Brief Encounter. We do it with a nod to the period but not so we alienate the audience.

Alexander: My character’s relationship with the office cad is very much like a kind of Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, who only has to touch Vivien Lee and she turns into wilted spinach. So in terms of my interpretation of the character, it was really important to give her backbone, real backbone. She doesn’t wilt. None of them wilt. I think they would have wanted to see that back in the ’30s whereas I think that if any of us did that today we would lose the audience’s respect and interest.

Has being in London Wall affected how you feel about marriage?

Dunmore: Pah, marriage! Are you getting married dear? Because I’m not. No, we’ve both split up with our boyfriends since the show. It ends relationships this play. I never wanted to get married, and still don’t.

Alexander: Yeah, and I have been thinking a lot recently that I don’t.

Dunmore: We’re all the single ladies, all the single ladies.

Alexander: I don’t think it’s right for people to make promises they can’t keep.

Dunmore: Exactly.

Alexander: But unfortunately I don’t think the message of the play is, you don’t need to get married.

Dunmore: Well, I don’t know. It might be slightly…

London Wall plays at St. James Theatre from 7th May until 1 June. For tickets and more information, visit http://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk/events/london-wall/.

Image credit: Graham Cowley

…you shouldn’t have fallen in love with? Ugh. I’m an adult, right? Refocusing my acting career at the Unidentified School of Showbiz Dreams? So why am I spending my precious days falling for people I really shouldn’t be? It really is very inconvenient to find yourself attracted to people young enough to be your slightly immature cousin. It’s times like this that being older in this environment really bites.

But enough of the Bridget Jones impersonation. You find me at the start of ‘reading week’, that yearned-for week of alleged rest in which to realign and rejuvenate the aching body and the overtaxed mind. I have responded by going home and throwing my washing on the mercy of my mother. Heaven knows I could do with the break. Big surprise – drama school is intense. Not unmanageably so, but intense nonetheless.

So. End of my first half-term and I’m very happy and settled – in many ways a preferable state to that first flush of…er, love. There are classes I prefer, of course, and certain classes I dread (why hello, Meisner) but on the whole, I seem to be doing well. My whole class have effectively ‘performed’ in front of one another now, revisiting our audition pieces (text and singing) with the benefit of what we’ve learnt so far and I’ve had some great feedback, which is gratifying and something of a ‘phew-you-don’t-think-you’ve-made-a-mistake-in-accepting-me-then’ moment. It’s been nerve-wracking, but in a nurturing way – there’s a care that comes from the tutors and from my fellow students that I wasn’t necessarily expecting, but which is very welcome. It’s also the way I prefer to work – I have never thrived on pressure and being ‘forced’, but like to be coaxed.

Re: Meisner (see above), things may be looking up. The ante has been officially upped and next half-term, we’re moving on from simple circumstance exercises to progressively more important and affecting ones, which should be interesting. Incidentally, I’ve been lucky enough to witness the second years in their Meisner classes, and much hilarity ensues from watching them running up and down the stairs in character in order to enter the scene with appropriate energy à la Uta Hagen.

This past week has also been the first week of performances for the third years. Me and my uber-tall dark(ish) and handsome(ish) non-stranger (the aforementioned inappropriate crush) have been to see a number of shows and I have been mightily impressed. It’s kind of a relief, I guess, to witness the most advanced students in the school and recognise that they are good – excellent, in fact. Another ‘phew’ moment.

Finally, our fortnightly visit to my flat and the colourful characters who reside there. We (I say we, I mean they) threw a party last night which was promptly shut down by the police, who also cut our electricity to prevent it starting up again. I was ashamed to realise that, to me, the most intolerable consequence of this was that I wouldn’t be able to have a cup of tea before bed. Pipe and slippers, anyone?
Image by IYLIAA.

Continuing our The Dark Side of Love blog series is cast member Rosy Morris, who talks about accessing emotion in Shakespeare’s work.

When we first started devising The Dark Side of Love at the Roundhouse we were sent into a whirlwind of emotion – for me it was love, a raw one. Having just split up with my boyfriend was at the core of my reasons for wanting to take part in the project. Welcome to the universal world of Shakespeare and his on ongoing relevance in people’s lives.

The beginning of the process was all about opening up, telling our own stories of love and loss. Not all of us had been in love, however everyone has obviously experienced love of some sort whether it be a lover, friend or a family member.

However, the theme of loss seemed to be much more provoking. It seemed the older cast members had lost a lover – myself being one of them – but the interesting point here was that when we relate our own stories back to Shakespeare’s, he understood humankind perfectly. He was able to grasp the subtleties of people through language. It was here I realised I related most to Ophelia from Hamlet. She is rejected without knowing why. A common question I think a lot of women have – both young and old – is why men in particular have such a tendency to reject with such ambiguity. Why all the secrets? Why does society repeat itself with the insistence on hiding the reasons behind our dismissive actions? Does one who is rejected not deserve the respect and right to know why they have lost this relationship?

But, moving on from the dark side of love and onto a jolly subject: death. When our Brazilian director Renato Rocha asked us to imagine a freshly dead person, we all had to delve deep into our imaginations. He was quietly shocked by this, explaining that he had experienced people being shot in the streets on a regular basis. I guess this is one way London life protects us from reality; police arrive almost instantly on the scene of a crime and clean it all up. It seems that Brazil’s knowledge of death shares similarities with that of Shakespeare’s time. He wanted us to improvise a scene of death, bringing objects into the space relating to them, asking ourselves what they meant, why we were using them and what their significance was. By doing this we created a montage of thought-provoking images allowing us to think further about the significance of death and what it means to different people.

Further into the devising process, we worked on acting on instinct, which for most of us was an initial struggle especially when doing so in front of an audience – as performers our initial reactions were to ‘act’ our responses to our surroundings. Removing ourselves from this was a great relief once we got the hang of it and allowed us to use it as a tool further on, whether that meant it simply helped us relate to our characters or even just playing around with our speeches.

Overall, the last 10 months have taught us all so much about how to create and devise your own piece of theatre. By interpreting the great Bard’s work one can see that his stories are so universal that even when you do play around with them a lot of the ideas from the original plays are still highly distinguishable. And if you ever find yourself questioning why Shakespeare still lives on today, all you need do is look around, because he’s in everything and everyone.

The Dark Side of Love will be staged at the Roundhouse 26 June – 8 July. Commissioned by the Roundhouse and LIFT, it forms part of the World Shakespeare Festival.