Filmic structures are always tricky on stage. David Mamet, an exception, can get away with writing long chains of scenes that last a couple of minutes each. But the theatre prefers to relax, to snuggle down, to linger slowly over every morsel of a many-layered spread. Encountering a screenplay on stage is like receiving a box of Milk Tray in a restaurant and being told it’s a 32-course meal.
David Gooderson’s made-for-TV script concerns an Edwardian sex scandal featuring teenage boys and lauded grandees. Sir Hector MacDonald (aka Fighting Mac) was a crofter’s son who enlisted as an infantryman and reached the rank of major-general during a 20-year career. To rise so high without a private income was pretty rare in Britain’s gentry-loving military. Fighting Mac was posted to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to serve as General Officer Commanding and it’s here that we first meet him. And what a pest he is.
He’s a chippy, moralising disciplinarian, and his chief talent is for barking orders at nervous subalterns and refusing the offer of a wee drinkie on the verandah. As a Highlander, he secretly loathes the suave English colonists who laze around the hill stations of Ceylon playing cricket, pouring whiskies down their throats and holding fancy-dress parties as if they were all ensconced in cosy Woking. With no fighting for Fighting Mac to do, he must rely on his diplomatic skills. But he has none. Expected to waltz with the Governor’s wife at a ball, he shouts across the room, ‘It’s my duty to dance with you. So let’s move into position.’ ‘General,’ she says, ‘I’m not a gun carriage.’
Fighting Mac prefers the company of a lowly Ceylonese bank clerk whose teenage sons he lavishes with gifts.
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