I am all for plays about moral issues. The problem with Ron Hutchinson's new work, however, is that the central dilemma carries little conviction. Should a publisher circulate or incinerate the racist journals of one of its best-selling authors? In the real world you feel that, if the journals were any good, they would publish and be damned: the one thing they wouldn't do is destroy them.
All Hutchinson's premises seem a little shaky. He posits the idea of a writer, Edward Mallowan, who has created a twelve-novel sequence exploring the moral issues of the modern world; not least what to do with the paintings the Nazis labelled degenerate.
The man is a potential Nobel candidate, attracts correspondence from the world's greatest writers and is a northern recluse who has kept his private journals hidden from his tame academic biographer. Suddenly, for no clear reason, Mallowan not only wants his journals published but threatens to take his new novel elsewhere if they're not.
Think Philip Larkin, whose name is naturally invoked, and you begin to see the falsity of the dilemmas. The Little Englandism of Larkin's letters, which were of course published, is deducible from his poetry and journalism; in Mallowan's case there seems a ludicrous chasm between the sensitivity of his fiction and the banal racism of his journals. As the play proceeds, the false choices proliferate.
At one point Neil, a pragmatic Scot who wants to destroy the diaries, asks Richter, the publishing house's brash American owner, what he would have done if in 1925 he had possessed the sole copy of Mein Kampf: the implication is that, by destroying it, he could have saved the lives of 6m Jews. The reality is that the book was so turgidly written it was scarcely read even by dedicated Nazis.
Even Mallowan's frontal attack on his biographer, though amusingly written, seems wide of the mark. You can argue, as Scott Fitzgerald did, that a biography of a novelist is inherently impossible: "he's too many people if he's any good". But Mallowan's line that biography is generally conceived in sullen hate just seems sour grapes.
Where Hutchinson comes closer to truth is in his portrayal of the fractious nature of modern publishing. In Denis Lawson's production, roving between London, Manchester and Tuscany, there are sparky exchanges between John Gordon-Sinclair's incendiary Neil, Miranda Pleasence's author-defending editor and Rob Spendlove's wiry American owner. Kenneth Colley also has the right solitary grumpiness as the morose Mallowan. But it seems a pity that this unfocused debate about literary ethics has been given London exposure at the expense of Ben Brown's Larkin with Women, seen in Scarborough last year, which examined a real writer's life with exemplary sensitivity.
Until June 3. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
