London Wall

Secs and the City

London Wall

by John William Van Druten

Questors Production at the Judi Dench Playhouse, Ealing until 20^th July

Review by Andrew Lawston

The problem with plays based in offices is that they are very often written by people who have never, or rarely, worked in an office.  John Van Druten’s play London Wall, focusing on the staff of a City law firm, benefits from the playwright having practised law for a number of years.  The offices of Walker, Windermere & Co feel from the outset like a real business, and in many respects one which could still be running today with only a few upgrades to the office technology.

Throughout this lengthy play, the law firm’s business runs alongside the play’s narrative, as the cast of secretaries dash around Charles Dixon’s lavish recreation of a 1930s legal firm, with all its huge sturdy desks, paintings lining the walls, shelves stuffed with reference books, electric buzzers, and a single telephone.

This detail is engrossing, and just as well, as it could be said that the story itself is rather slight.  Slick lawyer Mr Brewer (Daniel Thompson, exuding huge charm in his role as a distinctly predatory character) flirts with the secretaries as a matter of course, but focuses his attentions on the new starter Miss Milligan, or Pat (Greta Azzopardi, who is the focus for much of the play and gives a nuanced performance of a conflicted character), who we are told is only nineteen, and who spends her spare time typing up stories for her boyfriend Hector Hammond (Kennet Kärema, whose tall frame gives him an immediate presence on stage and it’s a shame we don’t see more of him).

Through this uneasy office dalliance, we learn about the relationships of all the women at the firm.  Paid much less than their male colleagues, they are all desperate to marry, for financial security if nothing else.  Miss Hooper (a spirited Maya Jagger, having fun with the play’s most broadly comic role) is pressuring her married lover to leave his wife, while Miss Janus has been waiting for her Dutch boyfriend to propose to her for seven long years.  Miss Janus is played by Preeti Bhambri in a demanding role – an apparently prim secretary who is boiling with frustration and resentment at the world, in which she feels forced to wait to marry a man she no longer even loves.

Meanwhile Agata Frankowska’s glamorous Miss Bufton is openly flirtatious, out in town most evenings and enjoying life as best she can.

The play has a lot to say about the role of women in 1930s London.  Brewer stalks the office, openly harassing his female colleagues, while even the affable office junior Birkinshaw (Quinn Goodliffe, giving perhaps the show’s most naturalistic performance) is desperate to read the love letters being used as evidence in a divorce case.

The one client that we see during the play’s three acts is Miss Willesden (Patricia O’Brien giving a note-perfect performance somewhere between Dames Penelope Wilton and Maggie Smith), an elderly woman forever filing law suits and changing her will.  Despite clearly being the firm’s biggest client who provides them with a huge amount of business, the male characters dismiss her as insane, to the point where Mr Walker (Wesley Lloyd, providing an authoritative turn as the law firm’s largely absent boss) will no longer even agree to see her.

Despite her apparent eccentricity, however, Miss Willesden is in complete control of her faculties, and along with Miss Janus, proves to be something of a guardian angel to Pat, as she begins to regret giving into Brewer’s predatory advances.

Mr Walker is a fleeting presence in the play, and we never get to see his partner Windermere at all.  The colleagues all call him “Our Lord”.  When he does appear, in time to catch Brewer up to no good, the audience assumption is that he will side with the lawyer.  Walker’s essential decency, if of a very old-fashioned sort, is one of a number of surprises that the play’s characters have in store as the play reaches its conclusion.

The play was originally billed as a “romantic comedy”, which is striking in that it is not particularly romantic in its depiction of marriage as a mercenary pursuit of necessity, and for much of its running time it is also not particularly funny.  Director Richard Gallagher appears to have taken a firm decision to play the show as more of a drama, though no amount of characters running around with letters can hide the play’s distinctly farcical conclusion.

There are some surprising decisions made throughout the play, with desks set up so that even in the Dame Judi Dench Playhouse’s broad horseshoe auditorium, most of the audience can only see the back of characters’ heads during certain key scenes, as well as a fair amount of inadvertent upstaging which might have been helped with more thorough blocking.

Ultimately, however, London Wall is an interesting period piece that shows us how far the workplace has changed in some ways, and how little it has changed in others.

Andrew Lawston, July 2024

Photography by Hubert Blow and Robert Vass