Since Philip Larkin called Barbara Pym the ‘most underrated writer of the twentieth century’, a quiet cult of appreciation has grown up around her novels. She is the wry chronicler of understated lives: clergymen and spinsters or, here in Quartet in Autumn, four ageing co-workers facing a precarious retirement. Pym is a writer's writer, so it is a delight to find her work adapted so sensitively for the stage by Booker Prize-winning author Samatha Harvey and directed by Dominic Dromgoole (a very good writer in his own right), in a production which is completely attuned to the subtle, cutting rhythms of the source prose.
Harvey does an outstanding job of dramatising a novel in which little happens and even less is said. The indirect music of Pym's narrative voice, which drifts in and out of Edwin, Letty, Norman and Marcia's thoughts, is transposed beautifully into argument and dialogue, creating memorable parts for four very good actors. The comedy is in the sharp observation of apparently trivial details: the way that uptight Marcia and bantering Norman tussle over their ‘family-sized tin of coffee’, a shared resource that sweet-natured Letty and church-going Edwin, being tea drinkers, are excluded from. The tragedy is that the four ageing singletons have worked together for years, don't really have anybody else, but can't quite connect. They strive for human sympathy; there are frequent near-misses. When the women retire, they struggle to keep in touch.
This intimate staging in the round brilliantly centralises their not-quite-relationship to each other through a square mid-century desk, partitioned into quarters, with the four office workers seated not face-to-face but at right-angles to each other. Paul Rider's Norman takes the mickey and Pooky Quesnel's Marcia, despite her increasingly embittered oddness, seems perked up by his cheeky aggressions. Anthony Calf's Edwin is a ghostly widower, trying, not terribly hard, to do the right thing and recruit the others to the church. And Kate Duchene brings a lovely depth, wit and sympathy to Letty, who, despite the privations of her boarding house existence and a clear-eyed moral view of those around her, has not given up on friendship or love. They are all very funny, but the production never reduces them to figures of fun. The humour is shared; a survival strategy.
The pleasure is in the insight and observation. ‘Loneliness clarifies’, wrote Larkin. It could be the tag line for Quartet in Autumn, and for most of Pym's work. But this staging avoids wallowing in sourness or sadness, instead finding ways of bringing that insight to life dramatically. I loved the inspired comic business at a funeral, where none of them wants to hold the wreath and they pass it between each other. And there is a memorable and beautifully staged scene in which we hear snippets of the characters' interior monologues, a four-part harmony of the inner voices which they can't share with each other. It all feels very funny and very sad and very true to the understated tragicomedy of Pym's vision.
