Maurice, the play based on E. M. Forsters seminal novel, is back at Above The Stag, and if you saw it before then take heart its as good if not better than the first time round. With a few changes of cast and a reworking of the script by Roger Parsley and Andy Graham, it is a little shorter and all the more effective for it. Let me get my only gripe out of the way first, I say a little shorter with good reason a bit more judicial cutting in the first overlong act would not go amiss. That said, this a fine, astonishing piece of fringe theatre that transports us back in time to a Merchant Ivory world of cricket whites, communion and lazy holidays at country estates.Director Tim Macarthur has assembled a simply superb cast and brought out of them the very best that a director can. Adam Lilley and Rob Stott are hypnotic as Maurice and his friend Clive Durham, the former of which is driven to the black art of hypnotism because of his homosexuality, and the latter undergoing a swift heterosexual enlightenment while on holiday in Greece. I have been to Greece many times and fail to see how anyone could be heterosexually enlightened, but thats me, and this is E.M. Forster. Jonathan Hansler opens the play this time round with his superb eccentric portrayal of Mr Lasker Jones, the hypnotist to whom Maurice turns in his hour of need, a man so deeply repressed himself that he has the need to wear his top hat in his consulting room. He appears quite mad until he gives Maurice the best advice in the play, to burn the incriminating letter he has in his hand, and move to a country which has adopted the Napoleonic Code. He has one of the best lines. The English have never accepted human nature. Ah, now thats psychiatry.Gil Sutherland as Dr Barry, the family friend and physician, reminded me of my own GP when I was a lad in short trousers a formidable individual whose idea of curing homosexuality was to suggest a walk in the park where one might meet nice ladies. Sutherland is utterly believable in the role, spluttering with horror when Maurice finally admits that he is an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort. Stevie Rayne too, as under-game keeper Alec Scudder, is a man of his time too. Repressed by his class and position, but not averse to getting butt-naked and bedding his masters house guest, he demonstrates in the inevitable (and quite steamy) sex scene that all men are equal with their clothes off. Rayne is ever better this time round, looking as though he has stepped, braces and all, out of the pages of a D.H. Lawrence novel. The smaller parts are well filled too. Valerie Cutko takes over this time as Maurices mother, a woman who to whom one would hesitate to come out in a million years, or admit that you were not going to take communion, a sin of equal measure. And I loved Anna Gilthorpe as Clive Durhams wife Anne. She doesnt have much to do, but what she has she milks with aplomb. The scene where she introduces herself to her husbands ex-male lover over the telephone is a delight. She has nothing to say to a man she has never met but she spends a great deal of time saying it. The comic timing is perfect. Id like to have seen more of Gavin Dobson as Risley, Maurices university friend and child of light, but even here it is the case of a small part illuminating the whole. In short, you could search the London Fringe for a long time before finding a cast of this magnitude.Do see Maurice before it goes. The love that dare not speak its name never looked so polished and so elegant. An absolute treat.
