HE devised a way of making a meal out of tying a cravat, and a
sartorial fetish out of how to lay a table, but he emphatically would
not take tea. That is made quite plain in Bernard Da Costa's play about
the legendary Beau Brummell in Lorna Irvine's lively and epigrammatic
translation from the French for Fifth Estate.
''I can 'take' the train, I can 'take' a walk, I can 'take' umbrage, a
liking or even, if need be, a loathing, but I cannot 'take' tea,'' he
remonstrates with an admirer. The insistence on grammar as a matter of
courtesy anticipates Wilde, and it is more than a historical coincidence
that both aesthetes died penuriously in France after enforced exile and
imprisonment. They aspired to an ideal of exquisiteness that made
aristocratic England bristle over the implication of its own vulgarity.
Brummell, like Wilde after him, had to be booted out.
The play portrays him in his last days, holder of the mockingly
ill-remunerated sinecure of British Consul in Caen. Andrew Dallmeyer
does not make a performance as Brummell so much as a mesmeric act of
possession. He goes beyond surface affectation to capture the butterfly
of the man's soul, an immutable spirit scoring a triumph of imagination
over the grocery mentality of his tormentors and their crumb-counted
rations. We recognise a celebration of life force and a raising of
panache to heroic status.
Dallmeyer is nicely counterweighted by Andrew Barr, who plays
Brummell's faithful and caustic valet. At mild risk of some upstaging in
at least one of the ensemble scenes, Fifth Estate have supplemented the
cast and backstage crew with students from Telford College in a Sandy
Neilson production which is a more than creditable contribution to the
European Arts Festival.
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