Plum: a Wodehouse tribute that embraces all the elephants in the room
During a celebration of Wodehouse's life, it would have been all too easy to focus on the good times. The evening would have been diminished.
As Sir Stephen Fry, the MC – and so much more – of a lively team of talent, gathered to celebrate the life of literary giant Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, drew the evening’s organised riot at Wilton’s Music Hall to a close, he, then the whole cast turned to the stage and looked up.
Projected across the arched space above was a huge black and white photo of Plum, his wife Ethel and a favourite dog. In a sylvan setting, possibly shot in the gardens of Lord Emsworth’s Blandings Castle. Certainly, we had travelled there in our minds.
The intensity of the audience’s reception rose in a hallooing crescendo not out of place in a Drones Club bread-roll battle. The photo slowly transformed. Infused with increasingly vibrant colour, it seemed to respond to the warmth of sentiment in the room. Forging an enduring connection between every member of the audience and the great author they were there to celebrate.
Amy Lane, Director of proceedings, Charlie Morgan-Jones, Lighting Designer, and Ben Bull, Video Designer, had pulled off a cunning wheeze worthy of Jeeves himself. Clearly, they had been eating oodles of bally pilchards. To improve the brainpower. Not surprising. Lane thinks hard about “take your breath away” moments in every opera she directs.
Be it the conclusion of Wagner’s Gotterdammerung, the finale of Longborough Festival’s Ring Cycle, or Gounod’s Faust in Canadian Opera’s Toronto production there is always a “Lane” moment of the, “just when you think it’s all over” sort. She bangs another surprise into the back of the net.
Department of explanation. Plum? Probably every reader knows this. I, a Wodehouse fan, shamefully did not. “Plum” is an affectionate corruption of Wodehouse’s first name, “Pelham”. Go on. Repeat “Pelham” increasingly quickly, sotto voce. You’ll get the drift.
Wodehouse married Ethel Wayman in 1914. Tragically twice widowed, Ethel had a daughter, Leonora, from her first marriage to whom Woodhouse was devoted. She married Peter Cazalet in 1932 and died tragically in 1944. Plum and Ethel had no children of their own. So, the Cazalet family down the generations became custodians of the Wodehouse literary estate.
And, fortuitously for the Wilton’s audience, the Cazalets were determined to share the opportunity “for Plum’s words to shine” in speech and song, to benefit The National Literacy Trust. Last year the trust reported that children and young people’s book reading had fallen to the lowest level in two decades. Still much Wodework to be done.
The history of Wilton’s Music Hall dates back to the 1690s. The current premises in Grace’s Alley, Whitechapel, were built in 1859. Presumably they were decorated then, but do not seem to have benefited from even a lick of paint since. Paint does not feature in the jolly old Wilton’s vocab. Grade II listed, “patina” and “distressed” cannot do justice to the space. Amazing to discover that new-fangled invention, electric light, is tolerated.
Fabulous atmosphere. OperaGlass Works staged their scary, filmed version of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw in the haunting space in 2021. Peter Quint, the opera’s spectral presence, was at home amongst the crumbly plaster.
The evening was hosted by Sir Stephen Fry, in top self-deprecating form. Referring to the long overdue award of a knighthood to Plum, only a month before his death in 1975, Fry wryly ruminated. “In those days knighthoods were awarded for services of value”.
We were in for an evening of non-stop burlesque, minus any ludicrous treatment of the principal character, Plum. Fry was the MC, holding a fireside chat conversation with Plum about his life. Alexander Armstrong played Plum and characters from the Woodhouse oeuvre were brought on to engage in a biographical dialogue and present short readings.
Stephen Mangan delivered a heroically goofy Bertie Wooster, gazing out at the audience with an air of vacancy and drop-jawed innocence. Miss Baby Sol, vocalist, songwriter and powerhouse performer in every way, introduced us to glorious songs by Gershwin, Cole Porter, Kern and Novello, led by The Simon Back Quartet, perched backstage.
Lyrics, of course, by Wodehouse. More aware of his talents as an author, rather than lyricist, I was fascinated to learn how Wodehouse musicals dominated pre-war Broadway. At one point there were five shows running simultaneously featuring Woodhouse lyrics.
He coined shedloads of moolah and then went on to Hollywood to make barnloads more. The offers started at $2,000 a week ($8,000 in today’s spondulix). Then, Sam Goldwyn, the on-screen roaring lion, coughed up $2,500 a week. At the top of his writing game, Plum was, in own words, “finally in the chips”.
In Act One songs ranged from Anything Goes, performed by the ensemble to Church Around the Corner sung by Sophie-Louise Dann, musical theatre star and Armstrong, the absolutely everything of screen theatre and airwaves. Act Two topped out with The Land Where the Good Songs Go, featuring Hal Cazalet, a British tenor with an Atlantic spanning career and the Full Company.
Worth mentioning that there was a memorable cast of Cazalets involved in the bally show. Hal, David, and actress Lara. Their palpable enthusiasm for the evening turned a top class show into a family event. Introduced briefly to David as the babbling crowds drifted homewards it was not obvious that he would soon descend from that cloud nine to which the evening had transported him.
Piers Torday, the children’s writer, devised the evening. Familiar with the venue – his adaptation of John Masefield’s The Box of Delights first ran there in 2017 and has since been revived – his new “Box of Delights” suited the space well, was inspirational, emotional, hilarious and educational. What more can an evening dedicated to supporting literacy have hoped for?
Elephants in the room were embraced, invited to sit down with a comforting cup of tea and tell their story. In 1941, Wodehouse found himself in hot water. Interned by the Germans, he made five broadcasts from Germany and was immediately characterised as just another Lord Haw-Haw, a Nazi stool pigeon.
Wodehouse, a man who was patriotic down to his stapes, the smallest bone in his body, was appalled. Conceding that the very fact of having broadcast from enemy territory was, perhaps ill considered, the content of the broadcasts was well considered indeed.
Plum-full of well-concealed irony aimed at his Nazi captors, fortunately they were too bombastic to get the point. Goebbels didn’t do irony! If he had Wodehouse would probably have been shot.
At the end of the war, Colonel Edward Cussen of MI5 flew to Paris to question Wodehouse. He concluded that “a jury would find difficulty in convicting him of an intention to assist the enemy”. Cussen, a lawyer, went on to be judge.
During a celebration of a life, A Homage to Happiness, it would have been all too easy to ignore the Wodehouse elephant and focus on the good times. The evening would have been diminished.
Fry could not resist slipping, occasionally, into the character of Jeeves, a role he and Denis Price before him perfected in two hugely successful comedy series. BBC’s The World of Wooster 1965-67 – starring Ian Carmichael as Bertie, with Price as Jeeves. And ITV’s Jeeves and Wooster 1990-93 with Hugh Lawrie as Wooster and Fry playing Jeeves.
“I say Jeeves what is all that bally rot about me being on television?”
“I believe, sir, that reference is being made to an allegedly comedic programme about the occasional escapades of a gentleman and his valet, much beloved by the viewing classes with more common tastes”.
“What Ho! Jeeves. Would Aunt Agatha like it?”
“I fear not sir. Mrs Gregson is not known to be in favour of light entertainment in general”.
I was resolutely in favour of Plum, A Homage to Happiness, leaving Wilton’s with an optimistic spring in my step, veritably bouncing up Leman Street to Aldgate East tube station, inspired by the Wodehouse life about which I had, until then, known too little. “Pip! Pip!”