It might have been interesting to stage Harley Granville Barker’s Farewell to the Theatre in tandem with Robert Nelson’s new play, which, confusingly, has the same name and is about Barker (1877-1946), who was an actor, playwright, director, critic, visionary and a major influence in British theatre. He created roles for Bernard Shaw; he wrote plays, notably The Voysey Inheritance and Waste; he was the first modern director; he ran a magnificent season at the Royal Court Theatre 1904-1907, which the Court has never again equalled; he fought hard for a National Theatre; he wrote prefaces to Shakespeare. I think it was Max Beerbohm who said he was too intellectual to be perfect.
Nelson sets his play in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1916 when Barker was separated from his wife, actress Lillah McCarthy, and in a relationship with novelist Helen Huntington. Barker is thinking of giving up theatre but is uncertain what to do with his life. He attends a college production of Twelfth Night, a play he famously directed at the Savoy in 1912 in an all black and white production.
Ben Chaplin is very convincing but he is not required to do anything; he just has to be Barker. The surprise is that a major character, an odious American professor who thinks he is an expert on Shakespeare and enjoys humiliating his staff in front of the students, never appears and the expected confrontation between the two men never materializes. The play, essentially a conversation piece in the Barker intellectual manner, feels incomplete and fizzles out with a half-hearted performance of a mummers play, which feels tacked on, as if Nelson didn’t know how to end.