For Services Rendered, The Union Theatre

reviewed for The Spectator, 28 July 2011

Despite the early 1930s chintz curtains, there is something morbidly contemporary about Somerset Maugham’s drawing room melodrama, For Services Rendered, recently produced at the Union Theatre. Or as the affluent older generation noted, ‘The nation can’t afford itself the luxury of keeping an army of officers it has no use for… Times are difficult… Today’s young people are facing difficulties we never had’.

Yes, it’s a depression; yes, the global outlook is uncertain, but James Bound’s light and breezy staging found more nuanced points of comparison in Maugham’s unflinching portrayal of family breakdown than in the easy analogies between two Britains, wearied by military sacrifice and jaded by boom-and-bust economics.

Maugham’s tale of a proto-Sloane family cosseting their crippled, war hero son (while his friends struggle to survive economically without a regular army salary) taps into a now-familiar consensus about the futility of the First World War. But For Services Rendered was well ahead of the curve. To Maugham’s first audience, the pessimism of the play was unconscionable, an attack on the patriotic triumph of 1918, or as The Daily Express put it, ‘malevolent propaganda against those who live with courage and hope’.

Seeing it in 2011, the cynicism seems less surprising, but Maugham’s use of the country drawing room format remains radical and bold: it’s startling to see a bunch of flannel-and-cotton-clad young fellows bounding in from tennis to a scene that won’t end with lashings of ginger beer or a Noel Coward witticism. Instead, melancholy pervaded.

And although Bounds made a strong case for For Services Rendered, it was hard to escape the feeling that its lack of longevity probably has as much to do with the implausibility of its snowballing melodrama as with the political opposition it met on opening night.

Amid the many dramas that afflict the Ardsley family, the complications of age were sketched with the lightest touch, to the most moving effect. Eliza Hunt was exceptional as the family matriarch, watching the world prepare to move by without her, while Jon McKenna gave a heartfelt performance as her brother, a doctor tasked with navigating his own family through complex medical ethics. Bounds’ delicate timing of Hunt and McKenna’s scenes was enough to make each particular hair stand on end.

But among the younger generation, it was more of a mixed bag. Jonathan Peck was effective as the lugubrious Sydney, with an acutely convincing portrayal of blindness all the more impressive in the small space of the Union Theatre. Nonetheless, there were wooden moments elsewhere in the ensemble, and even the talented Sally Preston disappointed as Lois, the coquettish sister with the best chance of escape from rural spinsterhood.

For Services Rendered displays a farsighted understanding of the limited options available to women, but Preston attacked every emotional hurdle with a smiling wit, an engaging superficiality that veils the pain she claimed to feel. And to the detriment of an otherwise impressive Pamela Banks, as her older sister, the play’s treatment of female hysteria comes straight from the 19th Century playbook, Banshee-impressions and all.