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 t h e a t r e

from the Associated Press

"Melon" had a successful six-month run in 1987 at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, but a year later, Gray rewrote the play; (and yet again, in 2004). His comments follow this AP preview

SIMON Gray says it's his job to write the best he can, and to many observers, the Cambridge-educated playwright is one of the best British dramatists around. His new play, Melon ... is the first big opening of the summer, and promises to enliven a commercial theatrical landscape in London that presently looks fairly dull.
Alan Bates stars in the title role as a successful publisher undergoing a psychological collapse. It's the sixth collaboration, in theater or television, for the actor and author, a pairing Gray finds productive.
"I've always found Alan to be in complete sympathy with the text," Gray said. "He has a sense of the language of my plays. He knows where the jokes are."
Bates, best known for roles in such films as "An Unmarried Woman," "Women in Love" and "The Rose," won a 1973 Tony award for Gray's "Butley" on Broadway and starred in his plays "Otherwise Engaged" and "Stage Struck" in London.
Both "Butley" and "Otherwise Engaged" showed Gray's mordant humor. In "Melon," that humor is embedded in what its author described as a play about what it was like to go mad. "The insights are more ferocious," Gray said of "Melon," which was first inspired a decade ago by a book called "Breakdown," about a German psychologist's nervous breakdown. "Melon goes through a rather passionate journey," he said. "He's a middle-aged man of our time." The character becomes combatively obsessed with his wife's perceived adultery.
Like much of his other work, including his Off-Broadway hit "The Common Pursuit," "Melon" takes place in the upper-middle-class world of English publishing, which is, with academia, the preferred Gray milieu. The playwright said his fondness for these settings amounted to little more than laziness.
"Whatever stories interest me I like to write in a medium I completely understand, so that the details are right," said Gray, a former lecturer in English literature at Queen Mary College, London. "The familiarity means I'm actually much freer in the environment."
His ability to take the emotional temperature of one stratum of society has led critics to compare him to Anton Chekhov, the Russian author whose plays deal with similarly condensed communities."Well, we do both write about a limited universe, but I find (the analogy) deeply flattering, and that's all it is," he said.

Simon Gray's Comments

"The first version of [the] play ... ran for six months with Alan Bates in the lead. ...The play was written during a brief period when I'd replaced heavy smoking with a stomach-corrupting nicotine chewing-gum. I have at times suspected that these processes of simultaneous withdrawal and addiction contributed to the lunatic organization of the piece. At any rate, once I was back on cigarettes, I had trouble (the only time in my life) in recognizing the work on the stage as mine. No fault of either the excellent cast, or of the devoted and gifted director, who were all completely faithful to the text. It was just that there grew--through tryouts at Guildford, Bath, Richmond, through its successful run in London--a conviction that I'd got something wrong. Perhaps simply that the connections were too logical: an open marriage provoking jealousy; jealousy leading to madness; madness destroying everything of value in the marriage. My first uneasiness was followed by a growing recognition of certain structural deficiencies--in particular, a nightmare sequence in the second act that came more and more to seem a vaudeville set piece that fatally interrupted the narrative flow. ...
"About six months ago I decided to look at the play again--'to try to get it right' was the phrase I remember using. My intention, even so, was only to replace the nightmare scene with something more narratively cohering, and then do a bit of patchwork around and about the place. Instead, I found myself starting from the beginning, writing the whole play through again and again, until I eventually lost contact, not only with the Haymarket version, but also with the central premise in Professor Sutherland's book that had made me want to write the play in the first place, but in which, I now realized, I'd never truly believed: that jealousy can induce the kind of madness that requires institutionalization, drugs, electro-convulsive therapy. Exactly the reverse now seems to me more likely to be true--that so serious an illness could well have jealousy as its first and major symptom. ... In the last draft, not a single scene, and scarcely more than a dozen lines, [are] left over from the Haymarket version.
"It's not for me to say whether the new play is better or worse--or even worse--than the old one. But what I can say with confidence is that I am much happier with it, and would prefer to have it accepted as the authentic, if not the final version."

[The Holy Terror: Melon Revised was performed off Broadway in 1989, and on BBC Radio 3 in October 1989, with James Laurenson in the title role previously played by Alan Bates.]

Melon (at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London)

by Victoria Radin

 

SIMON Gray's meditation on cuckoldry (his word) begins simply and promisingly. Alan Bates, in a crumpled suit, sits alone onstage. Jagged music plays and light streams in similar shard-like fashion through what could be window bars. 'I'll tell you what happens,' he announces; 'this is what happens when what happened to me happens to you...'

His words have the baldness of a poem; but their pithiness belies the rest of this play -- or plays, since there are several here, each trying to wring the other by the neck. The first is an attempt to describe what sexual betrayal does to the mind of a middle-aged man, long and happily married. The second is a deadly inheritance from that supposed dead dog, the drawing-room comedy, in which characters get up on their hind legs and utter remarks which have no purpose other than to astound the audience with the author's drollery. But the third play here is Gray's special province: his passionate love-hate relationship with his hero-a word I use here with more certainty than I would for the plays of any other dramatist I can think of. For Simon Gray's works are his hero -- who, in Melon, as in Butley and Otherwise Engaged, is a caustically charismatic man of letters who gathers round him a swarm of admiring nonentities whom he proceeds to impale with what the author hopes is corruscating wit.

In real life, no one would be able to stand this turd for a minute; but, as Gray insists, and as Bates embodies, there is something special about him that makes you love him anyway. This is, however, an odd premise for a play about 'when what happened to me happens to you'; for the insistent wondrousness of Mark Melon, or even of his wife Kate, severs any possibility of our connecting with them. There is no way that we're going to see what happens to them as ever being pertinent to us.

What does happen to Melon (an imponderable name: Lemon? Nolem? Honeydew?) is that, after years of pursuing his own 'little adventures' (generally, it would appear, with his secretaris, who are happy to exchange a bit of under-the-desk groping for some tuition in University entrance), Melon discovers his wife has been having her own affair. He decides to use this information to rekindle his appetite for her; but the fact niggles; he must know who her lover is. When she tells him (and his identity comes as no great surprise to us) he cracks up and is put away in the nuthouse. When he returns, all he wants from the world is some simulacrum of how it was before; this is no Laingian experience of going through hell to get to the other side. The point may well be true of most people who have breakdowns, but it is also typical of Gray's reluctance to rock the boat.

The play is cast in the form of Melon's shattered recollections of the events leading up to his bad time, which enables the other characters to burts in a capella singing (Melon is the 'harmonising spirit' among his friends) and, in one scene, to quack their lines like ducks. Mostly, though, life is a predictable series of jibes; one friend, in a sort of Grayian double whammy, is both gay and Jewish; another is a failed novelist worm who turns when Melon's back is to the wall; he has a wife who bursts easily into tears. Within Melon's family of BBC producer super-wife (Carole Nimmons, fine as far as she goes) and surly adolescent son (a very nice performance by Jason Carter) there is little warmth; directed at smoothly tearaway speed by Christopher Morahan, this is one of those West End plays of coldly suave declamatory style that makes 'I love you' sound like a threat. It is, of course, but not in the way intended.