Muddled, tricksy and cheap: The Corn is Green at the Lyttelton Theatre reviewed

The Corn is Green by Emlyn Williams is a sociology essay written in 1938 about a prickly tyrant, Miss Moffat, who tries to civilise Wales by setting up a village school where sooty-faced miners are taught to read and write. Miss Moffat is an unmarried English layabout who has money to burn and time on her hands and so, of course, she wants to ‘help’. You know the type? Director Dominic Cooke treats the script as a period joke and the actors are encouraged to mock their characters mercilessly. Hoots of cheap laughter echo around the theatre.

The show is presented very weirdly as a sort of botched technical rehearsal with lots of clunky sound effects and a Writer/Narrator on stage who paces about and shouts directions at the actors. This tricksy effect becomes very tiresome very quickly. And the playing area is cluttered with a choir of unwashed male stalkers who spend their time ogling Miss Moffat and bursting into song. The actors fight back against the choir by screaming their lines at top volume and trying to drown out the barber-shop harmonies. It’s all very muddled in a drama that calls for simplicity.

The ill-drawn characters are a heap of platitudes and improbabilities. We meet Bessie, the tart with a heart, whose mother is not just a self-confessed kleptomaniac but also a senior member of the Salvation Army. There’s a blonde special needs teacher, Miss Ronberry, who seems smitten by the village Squire although their romance comes to nothing. The Squire is a thick-as-mince millionaire from Cambridge, (‘so stupid he wears it like a halo’), whose witticisms include ‘all work and no play makes Taffy a dull boy’. His chief purpose is to invite us to laugh at the low calibre of Cambridge graduates because the playwright went to Oxford where he took a first in snobbery.