Excellent ensemble cash in on a lost gem

ALTHOUGH the theatre was hugely popular in the Victorian era, it produced almost nothing in the way of writing to match the vitality of the great Victorian novels.

Or at least so I'd thought, until seeing Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Money (1840), which in John Caird's fine production combines almost continuous pleasure with a real sense of discovery.

Bulwer-Lytton (1803-73) wrote himself out of poverty with novels and plays, and later became an enlightened MP; and this enthrallingly plotted comedy has much of the richness and generosity of spirit of Charles Dickens.

If you were feeling picky you would have to admit that Money isn't quite of the first rank, for it is intermittently afflicted with those prevailing Victorian vices of verbosity and sentimentality.

Yet the National Theatre's increasingly indispensible new ensemble plays it with such brio and precision that you are caught up in both the comedy and the often remarkably affecting drama.

Our hero, Alfred Evelyn (Simon Russell Beale), is a highly intelligent "poor relation", reduced to working for the apparently affable but in fact rapaciously money-grubbing Sir John Vesey (Denis Quilley). In the first act Alfred proposes to another poor relation, Clara Douglas (Victoria Hamilton), only to be turned down because Clara knows just how miserable an impoverished marriage can be.

And then, in a great set-piece will-reading scene that, like so much of this play, contrives to be both funny and dramatically exciting, Alfred inherits a vast fortune. Having turned him down in his poverty, however, Clara can hardly claim his heart now that he is rich.

The play's poignancy comes from the fact that almost throughout its length, Alfred and Clara are at cross purposes, mistaking each others' feelings and motives, and suffering dreadfully as a result. The plot is satisfyingly complex, with a real cliff-hanger of a climax, and there is a rich cast of supporting characters.

Caird stages the play with verve, combining emotional depth with sharp caricature. In Rob Howell's stylish design, the action in the Olivier Theatre is set on a disc which, in golden light, looks like a vast sovereign. But the gleaming gold is surrounded by a blackened rubbish heap, a reminder that Victorian wealth was set against grinding poverty.

Money, and its absence, is the obsessive theme of this play, and Bulwer-Lytton is notably pragmatic on the subject. It is poverty, he suggests, not money, that is the root of all evil, though he memorably shows just what malign folly the pursuit of filthy lucre can produce.

Russell Beale, surely the finest actor of his generation, is magnificent as Albert. On the surface there is the snide cynicism, mocking intelligence and barbed humour that this actor does so well, but it is accompanied by a sense of desolate hurt and real magnitude of spirit.

Hamilton is deeply touching as the endlessly misunderstood Clara, Quilley jovially repulsive as Sir John. There is also a double act made in heaven from Patricia Hodge as Sir John's stylishly worldly, warm-hearted sister, and Roger Allam, in brilliant comic form as a man in perpetual mourning for a dead wife who actually treated him abominably.

Add Simon Day as an dandy who can't pronounce his R's and Sophie Okonedo as Sir John's morally lax, deliciously dim daughter, and you have a truly great night at the National.

Daily Mail

Money is the root of all evil and money makes the world go round. Such is the theme of this extraordinary early Victorian comedy. John Caird's handsome revival delivers a totally beguiling evening.

Alfred Evelyn, played with bitter practicality by the irrepressible Simon Russell Beale, is a poor cousin who comes into a fortune. He loses his loved one, Clara Douglas (a stiffly hilarious puppet-like Victoria Hamilton) because he is poor. Then he loses her again because he is rich, but recovers her finally when he loses the best part of his windfall at the gaming tables.

Money dates from 1840 and has a Dickensian texture of caricature, sentiment and episodic vitality not lost on Mr Caird, co-director of the RSC Nicholas Nickleby.

The presiding manipulator is Denis Quilley's silken humbug merchant Sir John Vesey. But the conscience of the play resides with Russell Beale's energetic, sardonic Evelyn. Best of all are Sir John's sister, Lady Franklin - a perfect role for the killer English rose in Patricia Hodge - and the mournful executor, Henry Graves, whom Roger Allam plays as a canting usher with a permanent smell under his nose... Their tracery of a trite song followed by a Scotch reel is a glorious highlight of a memorable occasion in the Olivier auditorium.

Independent

"...As the new, highly entertaining revival at the National demonstrates, Bulwer-Lytton's play embraces a wide variety of moods - including high-spirited foolery a Hamlet-like disgust at human kind, and conflicted-over rough romance. Indeed, some of its most enchanting and original effects come at moments that are well- nigh incidental to the main theme... John Caird's assured Olivier production ensures that, throughout such shifts of tone, the morality-play aspect of the drama does not fall from view. The acting-area, in Rob Howell's design, is a giant gold-coin emblematically bordered by the ashen-coloured wreckage of homes blighted and destroyed by the profit motive. To incidental music that often has the smack of a macabre fairground, we are shown a shifting gallery of Victorian venality - from the silken, spurious kindliness of Denis Quilley's Sir John Vesey, who ekes a fair living from a false reputation for wealth, to the lavender-shoed Dandyism of Simon Day "upwoawious" Sir Frederick... The text could, I feel, use some cutting; but, by and large, Money is priceless".
 

"...The plot is old, very old, yet was in some ways new in tone. Sir John Vesey is a social climber who has manipulated London into thinking him rich and therefore important. When his cousin Alfred gets a vast legacy, he uses his daughter to ensure that he gets even richer and more important. Alfred, whose love for the equally impoverished and virtuous Clara seems to have ended in misunderstanding, finds himself engaged to Georgina Vesey, whose light, skittish heart belongs to a lisping fop. What follows has its surprises, but the ending does not. Dramatically, it is as if the 19th century had met the lag-end of the Restoration. You get arguments about Malthus, caricature snobs and cartoon vultures, sententious exchanges to out-Dorrit Little Dorrit, and earnest propaganda about true values. Yet Caird has assembled one of the finest casts in London: Allam, Hodge, Denis Quilley as the fake-genial Vesey, Clive Rowe as a proto-Thatcherite economist, Victoria Hamilton as a pale, nervy Clara, Simon Russell Beale as a splendidly acid, unsentimentally noble Alfred, even Michael Bryant as a club drone bawling for snuff. It is better than Money deserves, but it serves its purpose. It makes the play seem better than it is."