Travels with My Aunt
Adapted by Giles Havergal from the book by Graham Greene. Directed by Richard Rose. Set design by Joe Pew. Lighting by John Ambrosone. Sound by Byron Hurst. With James Bodge, Nicholas Piper, Michael Poisson, and Derry Woodhouse. At the American Stage Festival, Nashua, New Hampshire, Wednesday through Sunday through July 21.

The American Stage Festival’s balletic staging of Travels with My Aunt begins and ends in stasis, with tableaux that look like paintings by Magritte. In each, four men in cookie-cutter gray suits and black bowler hats, posed identically against a glass backdrop suffused with bluish light, are poised to take a sip. In the opening tableau, however, the drink is tea; in the closing one, it’s champagne. The small difference marks the distance traversed by a retired British banker, Henry Pulling, in the course of a year spent under the sway of the unconventional septuagenarian he calls Aunt Augusta.

Based on an uncharacteristically playful novel by Graham Greene, who described it as “the only book I ever wrote purely for fun,” Travels with My Aunt charts a journey that has less to do with geography than with an approach to life. Before being drawn into Augusta’s ambit, the 55-year-old Henry is a buttoned-up prig with one wing-tipped foot already in the grave and the other firmly planted in the backyard garden where he cultivates dahlias, his only passion. With Augusta or at her behest, he steps out, initially only for a day trip to Brighton but eventually across continents to Paraguay. Along the way, he encounters an array of colorful characters from Augusta’s exotic life and slowly uncovers in himself the curiosity and courage he needs to begin his own life anew.

“Carpe diem” is less fresh and fashionable fare than it was when Greene’s book was first published, in 1969, and the settings and sensibilities imported from the novel can’t help seeming a little stale. Giles Havergal’s adaptation also includes many fishy tales from the book, which Greene wrote on a giddy spree at around the same time he was doing dead-serious political reporting from Paraguay. Presented in the whimsical spirit he intended, however, the play’s implausible plot turns and unlikely particulars are part of its wacky charm.

The story of how the novel came to be adapted for the stage is almost as odd and improbable as some of the adventures Augusta and Henry share. According to the ASF’s program notes, Scotsman Havergal needed a cheap show for his Glasgow theater company’s 1989 season, so he started looking for a book that he could adapt and act by himself. Compromising, he sprang for three more male actors to help him portray 15 men, nine women, and an Irish wolfhound. Born of chutzpah and economy, this adaptation moved from Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre to a long London run and two Olivier awards. In 1995, a New York production helmed by Havergal won raves and assorted honors, including a Drama Desk Award.

As in Havergal’s production, the ASF’s Travels is acted by four men with identical costumes and few props. Although all play Henry Pulling, sometimes simultaneously, Aunt Augusta is the sole province of James Bodge. “Think Auntie Mame,” urges an ASF billboard blurb. Bodge’s restrained performance urges otherwise. Seldom ebullient and never brassy, his Augusta is endearingly vulnerable and quietly passionate — about men, her memories, life itself. Even when compromised, she retains her dignity.

Of the play’s other eight women, minor characters, none has a fraction of Augusta’s credibility — they’re cartoons, sometimes amusing but always overblown. When acting within their own gender, however, Nicholas Piper, Michael Poisson, and Derry Woodhouse show finesse, range, and remarkable energy. Although their portrayals of Henry are inconsistent, differing in accent and demeanor, each is memorable in more than one male role, and Woodhouse, who’s Irish, is a natural as the wolfhound.

But the professionalism of the cast, and the skill of director Richard Rose and his fine team of designers, is most apparent in the many moments when the actors are on stage but silent — reacting, signaling changes of pace and place, or shifting from one character to another. In their poise, grace, and physical expressiveness, all four performers evince the discipline of trained mimes. Precisely choreographed by Rose, this ensemble creates a comic ballet of what, in clumsier hands, might have been a clown show.

Issue Date: July 12-19, 2001