Too Close To The Sun

Too Close To The Sun

27 July, 2009
by: John Ellingsworth

Too Close to the Sun at the Comedy Theatre is already getting a huge anti-buzz of bad publicity – three one-star reviews from three big newspapers, and countless website and blog accounts that tell you how terrible it is and then urge you to go to see how terrible it is for yourself. Please don't. Please don't go. While it's true that there was an intoxicating, hysteric thrill during the interval as the audience either planned escape or necked wine and spirits with commitment and energy, the sad fact is that Too Close to the Sun is not an entertainingly bad two hours of musical theatre – it's a dull, inching, joyless two hours of musical theatre, and even if it succeeded it would do so on the wrong terms.

As a 'fictional account of what might have been Ernest Hemingway's last challenge', it sees EH living in a small house with his wife Mary and secretary Louella, unable to write, depressed, drunk all day. Such narrative momentum as there is comes from Ernest's old acquaintance, Rex, who arrives under the cover of friendship but really to try and secure the film rights to the Hemingway life story. They go out and they shoot birds, they drink more than they should, they talk about women and especially about Louella, with whom Ernest is trying to have an affair, and all the while deliver the most atrocious dialogue.

Too Close to the Sun is meant to have wit and pace, but stumbles along without rhythm or momentum. It's not particularly the fault of the actors; they're being made to say lines that range from the juvenile ('If bullshit could fly you'd be a squadron leader.') to the loathsome ('Louella Baxter will screw you until your teeth rattle.') to the bizarre ('Dogs chase cars. Doesn't mean they should drive them.'). The lyrics to the songs are certainly no better – one opens with 'Wasn't I the top barracuda?' – and many of them are queerly pitched: Hemingway sings songs about himself from a detached point of exterior analysis so that it sounds like a game of Who Am I: 'I drank myself senseless to prove what a big man I was.' 'My words explode right off the page with a powerful narrative energy.' Etcetera.

It's a story about suicide, or it ends in suicide. After driving off Rex and sending Louella away, Hemingway retires to his study and kills himself with a shotgun – the narrative of Too Close to the Sun in the end joining with the events of EH's life as recorded. Without wanting to spend a great deal of time reading about it on forums and in comment fields I understand that there's a certain amount of speculation surrounding Hemingway's death and some information also regarding his behaviour in the last months of his life – information that perhaps was a spur to the imagination of the writer, but which doesn't have to invalidate the emotional truth of the play by factual contradiction. It can be its own thing.

That said, Too Close to the Sun is not true in itself. In the play, writer's block is the ultimate torment – it drives EH over the edge. I don't want to argue that losing, or feeling you have lost, an art that you love and have led your life by, isn't painful or debilitating – or that it's a trivial reason to become fatally depressed. It's just that we like to think of genius as something we can't understand, that's untouchable, and I think what the play does is entwine that with the (false, self-generated) sensual and intellectual appeal of suicide. Whether or not you think that decision is ethically questionable, it doesn't even succeed in the manipulation it intends: you can't see what spirit could possibly have ever touched this Hemingway to lift him from being a bad raconteur, an egoist, a gregarious and friendless man.

Don't go.

Photo credit: Tristam Kenton

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John Ellingsworth