By Jerry Tallmer
Bernard Shaw, tongue maliciously only half in cheek, divided his astonishing dramatic output into “Plays Pleasant” and “Plays Unpleasant.” All of Shaw’s plays were written to make you think — you, the reader, the member of the audience — but his “Plays Unpleasant” were the ones (“Widower’s Houses,” “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” etc.) where your thinking had to work really hard against your own social class, your own proclivities, your own standards, your own prejudices.
St. John Emile Clavering Hankin, a playwright four years younger than Shaw and much admired by GBS, did not categorize his own (far fewer) works as Plays Pleasant or Unpleasant, but no one in 2007 can read or see his “The Return of the Prodigal,” at the Mint Theater through July 8, without having to work really hard to sort the good guys from the bad guys — socially, morally, economically, and otherwise — in and around Chedleigh Court, the house of the Jackson family somewhere in Gloucestershire, west of London, circa 1905.
Indeed, St. John (pronounced “Sinjin”) Hankin tacked three words in front of the play — “Character is fate” — and, as maliciously as Shaw, subtitled it “A Comedy for Fathers.”
The father here is Mr. Samuel Jackson, who with solid, upright, nose-to-grindstone son Henry at his right hand keeps expanding a cloth-manufacturing combine that profits hugely from built-in obsolescence of product. Samuel Jackson is also now running for Parliament, with the approval, or at any rate the sufferance of, Sir John Faringford and Lady Faringford, the county’s leading lights of (impoverished, but fawned-over) aristocracy. Hard-headed Lady F. knows full well which side her bread is buttered on, and how to capitalize on the ephemeral, hard-as-granite British class system.
Samuel Jackson’s wife, meanwhile, is one of those ladies who sews a lot and does good deeds around the neighborhood. Then there is Violet, the Jacksons’ daughter, bitterly if quietly resigned to the fact that she has long since missed the opportunity to escape lifelong spinsterhood.
And then, one fine day, there turns up on the Jacksons’ doorstep a ragged corpse, or semi-corpse, who when brought back to life with brandy and blankets turns out to be that other brother, Eustace Jackson, who was handed a thousand pounds by his father and dispatched to Australia five years earlier, in the hope that he would never return.
But here he is, all washed up, throwing himself on the mercy of everything he most despises — “the governor,” as he calls his father, and “the mater” — well, he doesn’t really despise the mater, he’s just sort of sorry for her.
“When do you go back to Australia? Quite soon I hope,” says Lady Faringford, brisk and callous as ever, shaking hands. But Eustace has had quite enough of Australia, thank you, and of sordid menial labor of one sort or another. And everything — everything bores him.
“If I were a man,” says Stella, Sir John and Lady Faringford’s pretty daughter, who has piqued Eustace’s interest a little, “I would go abroad and visit strange countries, and have wonderful adventures as you’ve done, not waste my life in a dull little village like Chedleigh.”
“My dear Miss Faringford,” the retuned prodigal replies with a sigh, “the whole world is a dull little village like Chedleigh, and I’ve wasted my life in it.”
Well, try as one may, it is really not easy to love a fellow — even a very bright fellow — who condenses his idleness into above-it-all snobbery of that order … and then sets about blackmailing his father into supporting that idle snobbery with a check for £350 every year for life.
Somewhat later in the play Violet Jackson asks her wandering brother if he never looks back on his life and works.
“Never!” Eustace replies with a shiver. “If I did I should have drowned myself long ago.”
On June 10, 1909, some four years after completing “The Return of the Prodigal,” St. John Hankin — two months short of his 40th birthday and 10 days after wandering away from a sanitarium at Llandrindod, Wales — was discovered drowned in the River Ithon, with two gymnasium bar bells tied around his neck. “I have found a lovely pond in a river, and at the bottom I hope to find rest,” he had written his wife.
Bernard Shaw called the death “a public calamity,” but over the years that calamity was pretty much forgotten until the Shaw Festival in Ontario, Canada, resurrected this play six years ago, followed by Gus Kikonnen’s staging of Hankin’s “The Charity That Begins at Home” at the Mint Theater in 2002.
Though playwright-director-producer Harley Granville Barker did a famous “thousand performances” (1904-1907) showcasing at the Court (now Royal Court) Theater of a whole spectrum of new British drama, including eight by Shaw and two by Hankin, the latter’s “were not met with either acclaim or acceptance,” says Mint Theater artistic director (and director of this production) Jonathan Bank. “They really made people angry.”
Eustace Jackson may start out as an admirably detached outsider, but before the play is through, he makes us as angry as anyone else in it; more angry, in fact.
“No, he’s not an anti-hero,” says Bank. “Nowadays we’ve accepted the idea of the anti-hero, but, boy, one hundred years ago the very idea of an anti-hero would have been unprecedented.
“The thing here is we don’t know who to root for, ultimately, but that’s not because we don’t like any of the people in it. I can sympathize with the father, and even with the brother. I hope that audiences will be arguing over dinner after the show: ‘He [Eustace] seems to be capable; why doesn’t he do something?’ ”
The actors are Richard Kline, Tandy Cronyn, Bradford Cover, Roderick Hill, Leah Curney, Lee Moore, Kate Levy, Margo White, W. Alan Nebelthau, Cecilia Riddett, and Robin Hynes.
In their hands rests the annealing of a Play Unpleasant into the Experience Pleasant.
THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL. By St. John Hankin. Directed by Jonathan Bank. Through July 8 at the Mint Theater, 311 West 43rd Street, Third Floor, (212) 315-9434, www.minttheater.org.
