Two illustrious actors, married to each other, get home one night after their latest Shakespearean performance some time in the 1970s, and proceed to have a row about acting, fidelity, fame and long-buried secrets. I can’t think of a more appropriate premise for a play mounted in, of all places, the Burton Taylor Studio, named for one of the most tempestuous relationships in the history of stage and screen, that of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
In writer-director Anna Stephen’s script there’s a definite flavour of the famous Burton-Taylor turbulence. Sylvia and Harold have grudges against each other that go back years, wounds too deep to heal, too painful to probe, and it’s all crusted over with a façade of affection that slowly crumbles before our eyes.
Stephen’s dialogue is realistic. The characters constantly revolve around the points they are desperate to come out with, but always shy away from stating openly what lies behind the mask. Time and again the sinking ship of their marriage drifts towards cataclysmic rocks of revelation, only to slip back into the darker waters of concealment and shared pain.
The trouble is, Sylvia and Harold know exactly what they’re talking about. Every time they say something like, ‘But you always knew that I….’, ‘Yes, of course I did,’ they’re sharing something with each other, but not with us, the audience. That is a perfectly fine narrative technique, teasingly withholding information to keep us guessing, to keep us, in fact, interested. But part of the dramatist’s skill lies in knowing how much expository rope to give the audience, and in Better Yesterday we just don’t get anything like enough to hold on to.
As a result, over the course of the play I found myself going from intrigued to frustrated to head-swimmingly infuriated over the total lack of any form of identifiable resolution, revelation or reconciliation in Sylvia’s and Harold’s lives. They seemed to veer from the domestic to the dramatic with no rhyme or reason. At one stage Harold says (for the umpteenth time) that they should go out for a walk, then promptly picks up a rifle and threatens to shoot himself. Why? Because of… well, I’m not entirely sure. Something Sylvia’s done? There’s certainly something in their past that’s causing anguish. Towards the end Harold finally says he’s going to explain everything. (I think, "Yay! At last".) And then he doesn’t. Instead he picks up a pile of papers he’s been writing and hiding for years, and says, "It’s all in there". (Me: same thought.) And then, Sylvia throws it all on the fire.
There are occasional hints as to the source of Harold’s and Sylvia’s mutual grudges. Did they have a child? Possibly. Harold has certainly been having affairs… or has he? For her part, Sylvia has been changing her performing style from old-fashioned declaiming to modern method acting, which includes, as part of her personal reinvention, the use of newfangled shower oils and pesto*. If that is the basis of their disagreement then it seems to me that Harold doesn’t have much of a case. But since they never truly come out with the reason for their anguish, it’s hard to say for sure.
Let me repeat, the characters are certainly three-dimensional and believable. But watching Better Yesterday was like looking into a personal diary from which all the actual events have been removed, and only the commentary remains. A treasure-map with the ‘X’ missing. With its late-night arguments and endlessly inescapable scenario it was a bizarre combination of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (which starred, guess who, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor) and Waiting for Godot. However it was Godot with the waiting but none of the absurdity. And it was Who’s Afraid with the grudges but none of the fear, brutality and torture.
There is a fantastic outpouring of new writing going on in Oxford. It’s wonderful to see. And Anna Stephen should be congratulated on creating a believable pair of thesps. But sometimes it’s worth bearing in mind that there are great plays out there that already exist, and there’s much to be learned from them. I’d love to see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on the stage. It’s rarely performed, and it could give Better Yesterday a better future.
*a bit of an anachronism for England in the 1970s. Pesto didn’t hit the UK till about 1991. We had it tough back then.