“AT SOME point in their marriage Tom Eliot went mad and promptly certified his wife.”
That’s what Edith Sitwell said to Michael Hastings before he wrote this absorbing, moving play in 1984, and, if Tom and Viv is to believed, she had a point. Eliot’s first wife was mischievous, erratic and sometimes pretty peculiar. But was T. S., who had vowed undying love for her, justified in so utterly abandoning a woman who could claim to be his muse, or at least his Dark Lady?
But then, as Hastings concedes in his intro to the text, Tom and Viv isn’t wholly to be believed. The play belongs to that increasingly popular but deeply questionable genre, speculative biography, or “faction”.
Yet Lindsay Posner’s revival offers more than fake-historical frisson. With Will Keen effectively charting Eliot’s progress from shy, naive graduate to exhausted husband and guilt-ridden poet, and Frances O’Connor at her best as the doomed Vivienne Haigh-Wood, it’s undoubtedly strong theatre.
Much of the play is funnygoing-on-hilarious. No wonder that’s the case when the insecure young American, blinded by the spurious glamour of Europe’s upper-middle class, escapes from his origins into the decent but unpoetic world of the Haigh-Woods: Benjamin Whitrow as the dry, wry paterfamilias, Anna Carteret exuding seigneurial hauteur as his wife, Robert Portal as their genially Wodehousean son. They’re all excellent, and O’Connor superlative as a Viv who radiates a wicked, glittering charm at the start and deepens as the evening proceeds.
Perhaps she lacks the sense of danger that Julie Covington brought to the role 22 years ago. But then Hastings’s point is largely that to diagnose her condition as “morally insane”, as one eminent doctor did, is like accusing Peter Pan of paedophilia. Her sin was to push too far the games, whoopee cushions and all, in which she and Tom indulged. Perhaps she shouldn’t have poured melted chocolate through Faber and Faber’s door or terrorised Virginia Woolf and Ottoline Morell with a joke knife — but then again, perhaps she should.
Anyway, O’Connor sees her as a wayward child, unaware of her own excesses and baffled past the point of desperation by other people’s starchy reactions to her. In extremis, she’s like some injured animal at bay and, at the end, touchingly dignified as she defends her husband to a sceptical psychiatrist. Meanwhile, Keen’s Tom, always a bit of a stick, becomes more confident and colder while retaining the sense of pain and defeat that infiltrated his verse. But can we accept the implied conclusion, which is that she made him while he unmade her? Not really.
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