By Michael Lewis MacLennan
Playwrights Canada
117 pages, $17.95
ISBN 0-88754-676-5
The Aesthetic Movement was really a cult whose members shared an intense preoccupation with formal beauty. Perhaps its most glittering literary leader was Oscar Wilde whose forte was the burnished epigram, and whose peak was The Importance of Being Earnest, the artificial comedy to end all artificial comedies. Most of Wilde’s books were illustrated by Charles Ricketts and Aubrey Beardsley, both of whom shared Wilde’s aesthetic ideals, though Beardsley was, perhaps, closer to Wilde’s propensity for shocking effects than was Ricketts who held to a belief in art as a high calling and one to be followed with decorum and seriousness of purpose. Ricketts was a closeted gay. His lover was Charles Shannon, painter and lithographer, whom he had met when both were art students. Ricketts was the dominant one; Shannon, the quieter, passive companion who yearned to marry a woman. Bisexuality was, evidently, the secret love that dared not speak its name.
Ricketts and Shannon were, along with Wilde, Beardsley, and a few others, the last Romantics, and it is their common dedication to the cult of art for art’s sake that constitutes the central theme in Michael Lewis MacLennan’s play. This elegantly produced script, aided by useful historical notes by J.G.P. Delaney and stills from the CanStage production, is really an elegy to art, beauty, and sacrifice. It follows two long-forgotten artists from the drawing-rooms of fin-de-siecle London to Mackenzie King’s Canada on the eve of the Great Depression in order to portray a world left behind by the modern world. Ricketts and Shannon collected Old Master and Pre-Raphaelite drawings, classical Greek pottery, sculpture and Tanagra figurines, Japanese prints, and Persian miniatures. But the play has a problem with its structure. Conceived as part-satire, part-phantasmagoria of a decaying mind, Last Romantics is narrated in flashbacks by Charles Shannon who was struck by tragedy when he fell off a ladder and lost his memory. He couldn’t even remember his long-time lover, though the two remained together in a remarkable example of loving companionship. By using Shannon as his narrator, MacLennan surrenders full-fledged dramaturgy to the service of an unnecessary intermediary. This is playwriting by caption or summary. We are told what the empty gilt frames are supposed to hold: a Botticelli, Watteau, Millais, or Rubens. We are forewarned that the narrator is addressing the future that is waiting to judge him, and when a question is raised (“Why do we love one thing and not another?”), there is not necessarily an answer. When the action does proceed, it is effected through allusions to classical mythology (especially of Apollo and Sibyl) and by potted characterizations. And so we have appearances by Beardsley, a broken Wilde in prison, the French Symbolist painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, “Michael Field,” Charles Holmes (Director of the National Gallery in London), and even Mackenzie King (who was advised on culture by Ricketts). Then there are the allusions to the famous and infamous unseen: Robert Scott, Bosie Douglas, Roger Fry, et cetera.
None of these devices is quite enough to give intensity and firm shape to the proceedings. Ricketts and Shannon share only one kiss of passion, and this comes too late to rescue them from an impression of a rather asexual gay couple. Even when Shannon grows carnal in his desire for the model Hetty Bruce, the ardour is more rhetorical than physical. This is surprising, given that the award-wining playwright knows “queer culture” intimately and serves as writer and producer on the hugely popular television show Queer As Folk. MacLennan seems to be unable to set his story spinning on more than simply a rhetorical axis. In some ways, Last Romantics reminds me of Tom Stoppard, but a Stoppard on a sloppy day, because the central thread of the work often gets lost in the broad tapestry. There are entertaining moments and polished, literate ones. MacLennan shows himself to be a writer of real wit at such moments, as when he has Beardsley describe himself as a “blemished gargoyle” or when he has Edith mourn after the death of Katherine: “I suspect solitude is something we learn like Greek.” But his play, unlike the best of Stoppard, seems to arise out of a socio-historical or psycho-literary agenda rather than out of a deep sensibility, and although it tells us something about the sexual and aesthetic mores of Victorian English society and about an anxiety over the dawning of the 20th century, Last Romantics fails at the visceral level.
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