Theatre in Review: Cornelius (59E59)

	Photo: Carol Rosegg

An almost entirely forgotten selection from the J. B. Priestley catalog -- even with Ralph Richardson in the title role, it eked out a mere seven weeks in its 1935 West End debut -- Cornelius is suddenly being hailed as a lost masterpiece for two reasons: A crackling revival, staged by Sam Yates, at London's Finborough Theatre, and Priestley's unflinching depiction of economic hard times. "A play for today," announced one London publication. "A socialist time bomb," pronounced another -- and it is certainly true that this account of a once-prosperous business sliding into bankruptcy has an oddly contemporary ring. (As if to stress the point, one reviewer noted that the play suffered by opening on the same date as Glamorous Night, one of Ivor Novello's glitzy operettas, about the love between a frustrated inventor and a gypsy girl. Substance was slain by style on that long-ago night, the argument goes.)

Yates' production is now at 59E59, and while it is interesting to see another side of Priestley, best known as the metaphysical pundit behind such time-bending fantasies as An Inspector Calls, Dangerous Corner, and Time and the Conways, it's not hard to understand why Cornelius overstayed its welcome in the West End after less than two months. The play offers a surprisingly accurate look at life during the Depression, but Priestly's economic realism is not matched by a similar psychological authenticity. If someone didn't point out that aluminum was its main product, you might think that the firm of Briggs & Murrison traded strictly in clichés.

Priestley begins rolling out the stereotypes the minute the lights go up on David Woodhead's tellingly detailed office set, in which the firm's pretense of prosperity is given away by mismatched furniture, grimy walls, and peeling wallpaper. We are introduced to the comic cockney charwoman who complains about the stuck chimney that spreads smoke through the offices; she spars with the lazy, dreamy office boy who complains that, at 19, he has no prospect of advancement. (He'd rather be doing something with wirelesses, anyway.) Next up is the bespectacled, strong-minded spinster, who, naturally, is (not so) secretly in love with the boss. And if you're going to have one of her type, then you simply have to have a willowy, self-assured stenographer to turn the boss' head and make the spinster see red. To finish it off -- they don't like you to break up a set at Central Casting -- there's the brusque old duffer with a heart of gold and plenty of common sense.

In Priestley's hands, some of this makes for real, if secondhand, fun, given his fine ear for his characters' colorful everyday speech. The charwoman complains amusingly about her diffident nephew, who married "one of these fancy blondes that's always having their hair waved." The stenographer explains that she found her last job less than satisfactory: "You see, I was working for a Spaniard," she says, packing tons of meaning into that statement, which is greeted with shocked looks all around. Cornelius dismisses a less-than-honest vendor as "a soapy young twister." Priestley can also sum up a character's dilemma in a handful of words, when an ex-soldier, reduced to selling shaving products door to door and weak with hunger, says, plaintively, "What gets me down is I'm not allowed to earn my living in any of the old ways."

Still, until the last few minutes, none of the characters escape the little two-dimensional pigeonholes to which they have been confined. Even Cornelius, who is charged with keeping this leaky boat of a firm afloat, is a surprisingly colorless creation. A middle-aged bachelor who admits to having squandered his best years on work that doesn't really interest him -- he spends every available moment reading about the conquest of Peru -- he remains an oddly reactive figure who exists to lurch from crisis to crisis. Even a silent eleventh-hour interlude during which Cornelius sits alone, staring at a shotgun, isn't nearly as powerful as it should be. Alan Cox makes him into a plausible figure of middle-aged weariness, hanging on to his urbanity under the most trying circumstances, but Cornelius is not a strong-enough figure to anchor this drama of social and economic dissolution.

It doesn't help that Priestley struggles to conclude the play, supplying the third act with several possible finales as each character exits on the firm's final day. Just when one is convinced that the play is finally over, Cornelius engages in a long encounter with Judy, the toothsome stenographer, who turns out to be a rather more complicated person than first presented. This scene contains some of the play's best writing -- and the revelation of the identity of Judy's fiancé provides a genuine surprise -- but it feels tacked on, not really relevant to the play's central action.

The rest of the cast does all that can be done with their flimsy characters. The way Pandora Colin's sad single girl publicly sweeps aside any hint of interest in Cornelius makes clear just how big a torch she carries for him. Col Farrell adds some depth to the plight of Biddle, who is too old to start over and is contemplating retiring to live with his daughter in Devon. Emily Barber's self-assured stenographer is believably the kind of bombshell who naturally unsettles her colleagues. ("You seem to be a most extraordinary young woman," says Cornelius, unconsciously taking a protective backward step.) Beverley Klein creates two lively comic cameos, as that fed-up charwoman and as the niece of one of the firm's creditors, who shows up for the bankruptcy hearing as she would for a West End matinee. Jamie Newall has a strongly effective bit as Cornelius' partner, who returns from a last-ditch sales trip in a state of mental collapse, full of paranoid ravings.

In addition to Woodhead's set, Howard Hudson's beautifully modulated lighting design suggests several times of day, subtly mixing natural sunlight with the tungsten lamps of the period; this is a first-class example of how much lighting can contribute to a naturalistic production. No sound designer is credited, but the composer, Alex Baranowski, fills the transitions with jazzy tunes that seem weirdly out of place in a play about drab, unhappy members of the lower middle classes.

Anyway, this most admirable production does little to disguise the fact that Cornelius is a dull and downbeat evening that meanders toward a conclusion that strikes an entirely false note of affirmation. Plenty of people are going to want to see this production -- for Alan Cox, for the chance to see such a rarity, and to fill out their knowledge of Priestley. That's fine, as long as you know what you're getting into. Like the company where its characters toil, it provides a surprisingly thin return on one's investment.--David Barbour