Theatre - David Jays enjoys a play of suppressionism and soft furnishings
"Do servants still exist?" asks the hero's fiancee brightly. Although moving the action forward to the early Sixties, Neil Bartlett's adaptation of Robin Maugham's The Servant (1947) retains a sense of distance, of a creepy tale living beyond its time. At the Lyric Hammersmith, a red-and-gilt gem in a concrete shell, Bartlett has excelled in uncosying a drama that preceded the angry young men. Bartlett's inspired direction digs for the subsumed drama - or what might be called "suppressionism". He is fascinated by the politics of seduction.
A murky seduction lies behind Maugham's novella of moral inertia. The writer tells us he resisted the naked, underage lad dandled by a blackmailing servant, but was shocked to find his buried desires laid out like a suit of clothes. In the story, Tony returns from Africa - "You've got no idea what it's like to be out in the wild for six years!" - a last-gasp colonial, craving urban comforts. He rents a grim flat in Chelsea, hires a manservant. Barrett cossets, soothes, procures muffins and whisky. His "niece" Vera arrives to help with the housework and anything else the master Tony might need. Before long, Tony is snug as a bug.
The Servant is familiar from Joseph Losey's 1963 film, with its characteristic Pinter screenplay: "I'll tell you what I am, I'll tell you what I am. I'm a gentleman's gentleman. And you're no bloody gentleman!" Although Dirk Bogarde and James Fox forge a gruesome complicity, Maugham hated the straightened film. Bartlett draws on the book and on Maugham's own unsuccessful stage adaptation. Never blatant (after all, the servant's skill lies in divining unspoken wishes), he allows lines an uneasy resonance. Tony, we learn, "wasn't the kind of son [his father] wanted". The fiancee, Sally, frets over Barrett's little attentions, chiding: "There are some things you should only do for a man if you're in love with him."
Jack Davenport's insolently lazy Tony is also puppyish, hugging his ankles and wiggling schoolboy eyebrows. Even before Barrett sidles on to the scene, Tony is subject to proprietorial jousting between his best girl and a childhood friend. Surprisingly little is made of the friend, a discreetly homosexual publisher ("We've just brought out a novel by a young convict") who is the book's fusty narrator, providing hushed homoerotics from the edge of Tony's bath: "He blushed all over."
When Barrett arrives, odd moments of silent awe and appraisal pass between servant and master. Each scene-change reveals his improvements. As unassuming table lamps cluster, it's like watching the crows gather in The Birds, a flock of soft furnishings marshalling for attack. Equally startling are the crimson cushions and flowers splashed across the dark bachelor nest. Michael Feast, purse-lipped, bristles with tucks and nips, all rectitude and solicitude - you have never seen such sinister cushion-plumping. The occasional dip in his vowels disrupts his manicured speech: "I only wanted to ascertain your exact requirements"; "I wouldn't like to be thought forward."
As Sally (Emma Amos) grows progressively elegant, an hourglass immaculate in scarlet or black, the awkward Vera (Zoe Telford) erupts into this poised cast. She scampers raucously up to her attic, darts straight talk and provoking stares, sprawls over the sofa in a baby-doll nightie. Tony totters towards her invitation, and although Barrett is briefly banished, he soon returns, his skull-like cheeks and gimlet eye assessing Tony's appetite for some under-age rough. "You don't find many like that," says Tony of Vera. "That depends on where you look," murmurs Barrett.
Tony speaks not of sex, but of a hapless desire for comfort. Although rattled by his own pull to entropy, he becomes immured in ease. The Servant is cleverly structured as a series of interruptions. Dialogue is ruptured; Barrett intrudes whenever he suspects a clinch, and smoothes the cushions as if to restore their virtue. Even the records playing between scenes are abruptly scratched short. Soon, like Tony, we long for the relief of an unruffled sequence, and settle into Barrett's masquerade of domination and querulous domesticity. He and Tony slump in front of the electric fire, Barrett spry in his dressing gown, Tony in slovenly jim-jams and quivering for whisky.
A dark staircase looms over Rae Smith's set, leading to the attic room of sordid pleasures. It's classic noir, especially whenever Paule Constable's lighting unleashes the shadows, Barrett hovering on the landing like Mrs Danvers. By the end of the play, Tony is taking the steps two at a time. Like his near-namesake, Bartlett has renewed The Servant's lure: "Just a touch of paint, sir, and a little thought."
The Servant is at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith, London W6 (020 8741 2311) until 21 April
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