The Finborough Theatre, under the artistic direction of Neil McPherson, has a good reputation for reviving neglected playwrights. Graham Greene, a self-styled agnostic Catholic (how very Graham Greene), wrote five plays, starting with The Living Room in 1951 in which 23-year-old Dorothy Tutin committed suicide and became a star overnight. In 1959 Ralph Richardson, Paul Scofield and Phyllis Calvert ensured the success of The Complaisant Lover. Ralph Richardson also appeared in Carving a Statue in 1964 in which he played a sculptor who was having a difficulty carving a statue of God. Denholm Elliot played the gentleman-thief in The Return of A J Raffles in 1975, an Edwardian pastiche.
There have been three stage adaptations of his novels: Brighton Rock with Richard Attenborough, Dulcie Gray and Hermione Baddeley in 1943, which Greene didn’t like. Paul Scofield appeared as the whisky priest in an adaptation of The Power and the Glory directed by Peter Brook in 1956. Giles Havergal adapted Travels with My Aunt and played the leading role in 1990.
John Gielgud initially rejected The Potting Shed, on the grounds that the public would stay away in droves. He found the play morbid and gloomy and decided to be in it only after Robert Flemyng, Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson had enjoyed a commercial success in New York. The 1958 London cast included Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Irene Worth and Liam Redmond, who stole the notices as a whisky-priest. Gielgud was going to repeat his role for his first appearance on television but when Alec Guinness was unavailable to play the priest, he decided against it, not willing to have the notices stolen by anybody else. The play has had only one London revival since then with Cliff Richard (yes, Cliff Richard), who was far too young and inexperienced.
The Potting Shed is a conflict between rationalism and religious faith. James Callifer (Paul Cawley) is not invited to his father’s funeral. The question is why? He must have done something terrible, but as to what it was, he cannot remember. “What is wrong with me?” he asks his ex-wife. “You are not alive,” she replies. It eventually turns out that James had hung himself when he was a boy of fourteen in the potting shed. He was given up for dead; but his uncle, a Roman Catholic priest, prayed for him and he was raised, Lazarus-fashion, from the dead. The family, devout atheists were deeply distressed by his resurrection. They could not accept that a miracle had occurred, for if they did, they would have to accept that God exists.
The best scene is the most controversial and the most objectionable. It is when James goes to see his uncle, who is still a priest, who recalls the day his nephew died and the prayer he made over his dead body: “Let him live… I will give you anything… take away what I love most… take away my faith, but let him live.” It is just the sort of bargain the author of The End of Affair would come up with. The priest no longer believes in God and has just been going through the motions for thirty years.
Paul Cawley is far too loud for so small a theatre. There are effective performances by Eileen Battye as the mother and by David Gooderson as the psychiatrist. Zoe Thorne, an actress in her mid-twenties, is amazingly convincing as a precocious 13-year-old; but the role, as created by Greene, is never for one moment believable