Stage-to-screen review: Jane Clegg

It's one of my own personal clichés that the Finborough Theatre approaches programming as if it's the fringe's answer to the National, with the ambition if not the budget to match. It proves true too during lockdown, with the room above an Earl's Court pub matching some of the country's biggest venues, by offering up archive recordings on YouTube for people missing their theatrical fix. Jane Clegg falls into the venue's remit that 50% of its shows be revivals of forgotten classics, as the play was a hit when it debuted in 1913, and its original star Sybil Thorndike kept returning to the title role throughout her career, but the play hadn't been seen in London since 1944 until David Gilmore's revival last year. St John Ervine's play was written with the Suffragettes in the news, and it reflects a new reality where a man might still legally be the king of his castle, but can no longer necessarily rule unquestioned.

Jane (Alix Dunmore) has certainly already had reason enough to wonder why she should still be patient with her husband Henry (Brian Martin) after he's already had one affair that she knows of, and she now only sees him late at night when he returns from his job as a travelling salesman.

After 12 years in an increasingly unhappy marriage, Jane has now got a financial backup in the £700 she inherited from a relative; despite Henry's requests that she sign the money over to him to pay for an unspecified business project, she insists on holding on to it as a nest-egg for their children's futures. The audience is soon clued in on exactly what Henry wants the money for when bookmaker Munce (Matthew Sim) visits, but even when his colleague Morrison (Sidney Livingstone) turns up looking for the money Henry embezzled from his firm, Jane is going to struggle to get her pathologically-lying husband to give up the whole truth.

Compared at the time to A Doll's House, there are some unquestionable similarities although the stakes for this heroine aren't quite as high - despite Henry's constant chipping-away at her inheritance Jane still has something to fall back on, and she doesn't stand to lose her children. Instead what was probably notable at the time is her quiet resignation to the fact that her life would actually be better if her marriage collapsed, and as a result the almost-indifference at the prospect of Henry leaving her. It's in his astonished response to her refusing to fight for him that the play feels most current in the context of #MeToo - a straight white male aghast that his privilege is no longer quite as all-encompassing as he thought.

This, along with Henry's almost farcical descent into an elaborate network of lies, give Gilmore's production a lightness of touch that stops Jane Clegg from coming across entirely as melodrama (Victoria Lennox as Mrs Clegg, relentlessly defending her son's behaviour, also adds comic notes,) but I doubt a 1913 audience would have seen quite as much to smile at in Henry's well-earned downfall. I don't know enough about Ervine's work to really speculate, but I also wondered to what extent he would have meant for the play to be quite as much Jane's triumph as it now comes across: An early scene of Jane's daughter (Eve Prenelle) knocking down a toy house her brother (Theo Wilkinson) built seems like foreshadowing of a woman breaking up the household, but I may be reading too much symbolism into it. In any case, Ervine's treatement of his heroine is far from unsympathetic, and in this entertaining 90 minutes Jane emerges as, if not the most proactive feminist, certainly one who's not going to humiliate herself by begging to keep a man who's not good enough for her.

Jane Clegg by St John Ervine is available until the 5th of August on OfficialLondonTheatre's YouTube channel.

Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

Photo credit: Carla Evans.