E.M. Forster’s gay romance Maurice isn’t nearly as well known as his other novels such as A Passage to India, A Room with a View and Howard’s End. Although the book was written in 1914, Forster only allowed it to be published after his death in 1970, as it was far too telling of the author’s own closeted homosexuality. It was also made into a Merchant Ivory film, as all Forster novels must, but not a particularly good one.
Now San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre Center presents the US premiere of a 1998 UK stage adaptation as part of its ongoing Pride Season. The script is written by Andy Graham and Roger Parsley, the same team that created the stuffy adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility that TheatreWorks produced last year.
Maurice is set in the very early 20th century but is largely free of historical references to specify the year. A clean-cut, sexually innocent young man named Maurice (pronounced “Morris”) Hall meets an animated fellow student named Clive Durham at Cambridge. Clive introduces Maurice to Plato’s Symposium with its celebration of love between men, and the two embark on an idealized, platonic but ardent love affair. From there the question is which will do them in first: the climate of the time, in which homosexuality is still very much illegal, or the development that one of them might take their love more seriously than the other.
George Maguire’s staging is brisk and well-performed. If anything it’s a little too brisk, which largely seems to be a flaw of the script that’s felt throughout the production. The play uses a flimsy framing device of Maurice talking to a hypnotist, but it’s utilized so little that it may as well not be there, and the transitions into flashback scenes from there are awfully abrupt.
Much of the dialogue is taken directly from the book. The story often seems rushed, however, because the play only bothers with the dramatic bits. We don’t spend any time with Maurice and Clive when they’re happy together; instead, we skip directly from the angst of two people afraid to admit their love for each other to the torment of their breakup.
There’s a long scene of Maurice slowly undressing. It has a strong payoff in the end, but up till then it’s perplexing that we’re lingering so long, as is Maurice’s sudden yell, “Why don’t you come?!” Who’s he talking to? Clive? The attractive woman the hypnotist keeps trying to get him to see in his trances? The idealized “friend” he sees in his dreams?
Kuo-Hao Lo’s elegantly simple set depicts a grand chamber, as near-unfurnished as a ballroom, that answers for the play’s various locations, with a blank view outside the window lit in various colors by Christian Mejia. In addition to scene-setting wave and rain sounds, Josh Sesnick’s sound design includes a well-chosen mix of waltzes and romantic music to accentuate and divide the scenes.
With a crisp English accent, Soren Santos gives an assured performance as Maurice, mild-mannered, snobbish and peevish when slighted. Alex Kirschner is a bright and upbeat Clive, at least until the going gets rough. There’s an easy physical comfort between them that comes startlingly suddenly, no doubt as part of the play’s insistence on moving things along.
Andrew Nolan is entertaining as the Wildean dandy Risley and the sensitive but undereducated undergameskeeper Scudder, who goes from nearly invisible to tender to just plain trouble to endearing again. John Hurst doesn’t make much of an impression as the hypnotist, who looks like a butler in his tailed tux jacket, but he’s far more animated as hearty Scottish family friend Dr. Barry. Aside from the accent and the name if you remember it, it’s not immediately clear that Barry is a different person from the elderly mentor who gives Maurice an amusingly frank sex talk with visual aids in the first flashback. (Oddly enough, this was the second play I saw in two days that includes a memorable scene of someone drawing in the sand, the other being Titus Andronicus.)
It’s symptomatic of the rushed feel of the storytelling that we don’t get to know any of the secondary characters particularly well. They come and go in a scene or two, and we’re left to imagine what their relationship and role in the story as a whole might be like. Lindsey Murray gives a solid turn as Maurice’s fretting mother, and Hilary Hyatt does double duty as Maurice’s high-spirited sister Ada and as Clive’s brusque (and possibly Welsh) fiancée, Anne Woods.
All in all, it’s an engaging period piece was a number of memorable lines, all of them Forster’s. Things end better than one might think, although the ending (still hewing closely to the novel) feels awfully convenient, leaning heavily on a relationship that doesn’t appear sturdy enough to support the weight. But that in itself feels true to the times in which the book was written. When you’re unable to live openly, it’s not so easy to say you could do better. Sometimes it’s necessary to cling to whatever shred of happiness presents itself, whatever problems come along with it.
Maurice
Through April 7
New Conservatory Theatre Center
25 Van Ness Ave.
San Francisco, CA
www.nctcsf.org
Show #26 of 2012, attended March 3.
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