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| L-R: Stephen Plunkett and Julia Coffey in LONDON WALL. Photo by Richard Termine. |
Mint Theater Company
on West 43rd Street in midtown Manhattan has taken it as its mission to produce
“worthwhile plays from the past that have been lost or forgotten.” Thus it is that London Wall, written by John van Druten more than four score years ago,
is at long last reaching an American audience.
Admittedly, John van
Druten was not a great playwright (as
were, say, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, or Arthur Miller), but he was one
of the more commercially successful
playwrights of the twentieth century.
His Broadway triumphs included Old
Acquaintance; The Voice of the
Turtle; I Remember Mama; Bell, Book and Candle; and I Am a Camera. London
Wall, however, which premiered in London in 1931, wasn’t even revived there
until just last year, and it never made it to New York. Not until now, that is, for which we have
Mint Theater to thank.
It is not that this exploration
of the lives and loves of four shorthand typists in a London solicitor’s office
in the 1930s is a great play for it truly is not. Even allowing for the fact that it was
written nearly a century ago, its story lines are trivial and hackneyed and its
characters stereotypical. But just
because it is not a great play does not mean that it is not very entertaining, for
indeed it is. Van Druten was very astute
in his observation and depiction of what life was like when men and women were
first being brought together to work in close proximity in business offices. This romantic drama is the result and it
really is great fun.
The play’s four shorthand
typists are four classic types that are all too common on the stage, in
literature, and, I daresay, in real life.
Miss Bufton (Katie Gibson) has been around the block: she knows the
rules in the war between the sexes and we need lose no sleep over her. Both Miss Hooper (Alex Trow) and Miss Janus
(Julia Coffey) are a bit more worrisome: Miss Hooper has been patiently
awaiting her married lover’s promised divorce from his wife to come through and
Miss Janus is equally patiently awaiting her boyfriend s finally agreeing to
tie the knot (after seven long years). We
can’t be too sanguine about their prospects.
As for Miss Pat
Milligan (Elise Kibler), a 19 year old naïf and an orphan to boot, innocent in
the ways of men – well, we probably ought be most concerned about her. Of course, we’ve seen and heard it all before
and matters develop much as we might have expected. Mr. Brewer (Stephen Plunkett), the office
Lothario who preys on innocent young women, does come on to Pat, and her
relationship to her boyfriend Hec Hammond (Christopher Sears) is put at risk. In motherly fashion, Miss Janus takes Pat and
Hec under her wing and when things get really out of hand, there is the
fatherly, compassionate, principled Mr. Walker (Jonathan Hogan), the firm’s
senior partner, to set matters right again.
Meanwhile, Birkenshaw
(Matthew Gumley), the firm’s young messenger, general gofer and switchboard operator,
amuses himself by listening in on the calls that come through his switchboard
and disclosing the contents of legal documents that he had no business reading
in the first place. Finally, popping up
un-invited at the seemingly most inopportune moments, is Miss Willesden (Laurie
Kennedy), one of the firm’s oldest clients, a very wealthy and somewhat batty
spinster with a heart of gold and an obsessive need to write and re-write her
will. We just know that she’ll
eventually have an important role to play in all this and, in fact, she does.
So there you have
it. It’s a story we’ve all heard many
times before and there are no major surprises (well, yes, there are a couple of
minor ones but nothing truly earth-shattering).
But as van Druten tells it, London
Wall is a story you’re likely to enjoy hearing again. And as the extremely talented Mint Theater
ensemble performs it, this is a play very much worth your seeing
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