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The Review - THEATRE by ILLTYD HARRINGTON
Published: 10 May 2007

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THE LETTER
Wyndhams Theatre

SOMERSET Maugham, the superb storyteller, is coming back into fashion.
Last week the third film version of his story – the Painted Veil – won critical acclaim.
And another tail of passion adultery and its painful consequences ‘The Letter’ has opened in the West End. Set in a bungalow deep in the Malay peninsula and a Singapore prison in 1927.
It is based on a true story of a headmaster’s wife who gunned down her lover – a tin mine manager – resoundingly, with six shots from a revolver.
Ethel Proudlock, a smouldering but deadly woman, escaped the hangman when the white colonialists community rallied round. White with White prevailed and she was pardoned by the governor.
Leslie Crosbie (Jenny Seagrove) is the sexually rampant wife of Robert (Andrew Charleston), a bovine but kindly plantation manager who has a boyhood chum, an affectionate and tactile best friend Howard Joyce (Anthony Andrews).
Mrs Crosbie, described as a woman with nerves of steel, dispatched her lover on the stair of the bungalow – puncturing him like Mrs Proudlock with six bullets in the first 60 seconds. She cries ‘rape’ and what might have proved to be justifiable homicide gets complicated.
Howard Joyce, the legal eagle, presumes a trial will be an inconvenient but formal, necessity. Alas it is not to be such plain-sailing.
A compromising letter from Mrs Crosbie to the bullet-riddled deceased comes to light in the hands of Joyce’s Chinese legal clerk Hong Chi Feng (Jason Chan). Joyce parts with ten thousand Malay dollars – a huge sum – and takes the damning letter away. After all these are the days before photocopying.
Mrs Crosbie is exonerated and returns to the domestic setting of the slaying. Of course all is revealed.
The devastated husband, their compromised friendly solicitor and Mrs Crosbie are not really convincing.
In their self-assured world their future looks grim.
Romantic writers used to excite old wives by talking of romantic triangles. Maugham is too honest an observer and learner for that cliché. This is a heap of human wreckage.
Seagrove manages to make a good job of Leslie, a woman whose veil of suburban propriety is torn off, and Chan is wise enough to avoid parodying the oriental. An evocative set by Paul Farnsworth and competent direction by Alan Strachan cannot rescue the devastating story of lust, blackmail and institutional hypocrisy.
They scratch the surface of this corrupt society – and that is that.
Until August 11

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