The Last of The Duchess at Hampstead Theatre

The Last of The Duchess at Hampstead Theatre

27 October, 2011
by: CatherineSpoonfed

Catherine Love reviews Nicholas Wright and Richard Eyre's take on Wallis Simpson in The Last of the Duchess at Hampstead Theatre

Whether portrayed as a reviled seductress or a misunderstood woman in love, Wallis Simpson has not been far out of the media spotlight in recent months, a flurry of revived interest on which Nicholas Wright’s latest play piggy-backs. Adapted from Caroline Blackwood’s book, this entertaining but uncertain piece is something of an oddity in the catalogue of dramatic portrayals of the late Duchess of Windsor, not least because the woman herself barely makes an appearance.

Simpson is instead a constant off-stage presence, the central but concealed cog around which the drama revolves. Wright’s focus falls on Lady Caroline’s thwarted attempts to interview Simpson in 1980, the circumstances of her book’s inception and her confrontations with the elderly but formidable Maître Blum, the lawyer to whom the ill Duchess gave power of attorney in the final years of her life. This is the individual who Caroline eventually found to be a more intriguing figure than a declining Simpson; the same evidently applies to Wright and director Richard Eyre.

Powerful and ‘difficult’ women, as the young Michael Bloch (an outstanding and delightfully camp John Heffernan) describes them, are Wright’s true subject in the form of Caroline and Blum. These two fascinating and complex characters receive an appropriately multi-faceted treatment from Eyre’s direction and from the equally excellent Anna Chancellor and Sheila Hancock. Chancellor’s beautifully flawed Caroline is simultaneously sparkling and drunkenly, distractedly dishevelled, while Hancock can effortlessly flip a switch between vulnerable and grimly determined as the ever-inscrutable Blum.

While so little actually happens, Wright’s dialogue is loaded with themes, many of which – like the precarious emotional plight of widowed women – are not explored to fruition. But the most engaging of the script’s numerous and often loose threads is the question of whether we can ever know a person through the perceptions of others. In Wright’s vision, Blum is adamant that we cannot; Hancock declares with luminous dramatic flair that ‘a human being is sacred’, dismissing all photographs and written accounts of Simpson as misrepresentations.

Caroline, meanwhile, makes for an interesting figure in this debate, subject as she was of both Lucien Freud’s art and Robert Lowell’s poetry, as well as being a writer herself. Doubts about her book’s portrayal of Blum as a demon are certainly raised by the occasional irrationally wild reaction the lawyer excites in Chancellor’s ruffled Caroline. Wright, however, has written himself into a tricky and intriguing paradox, for what are his creations if not just more inaccurate versions of impossibly complicated people? Perhaps this is his answer to the many futile attempts to unravel the life of the mysterious Duchess.

For the vast majority of the play all that we see of Simpson is a portrait on the wall, one of the many images of the Duchess that Blum rejects as false, and one that is tellingly shut away from the audience behind closed doors. Ultimately we do not learn a great deal from Wright’s adaptation, but perhaps that is the point. The mystery is unsolved, the Duchess stays locked in confinement and the enigma of the woman for whom a king sacrificed his throne remains firmly intact.

Last of the Duchess runs at Hampstead Theatre until 26th November


Image: Johan Persson




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