STAGE REVIEW : ‘TOM & VIV’ A DEAD END IN MARRIAGE

A number of people left “Tom & Viv” at the Odyssey Friday night mentioning how they’d like to learn more about T.S. Eliot, the subject (along with Eliot’s first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood) of Michael Hastings’ play, which was first done at London’s Royal Court in 1984.

But the speculation, which your reviewer shared, wasn’t because the play reacquainted us with a literary giant somewhat obscured in time as the American century stumbles toward its conclusion. It was because the play gave us so little of him, and going home to dig out a bio and some of his poems might relieve our sense of having been cheated.

Hastings’ main concern in “Tom & Viv” is their troubled marriage. Possibly the play was motivated by his conviction that Haigh-Wood, a talented, high-strung, emotionally distracted woman, had considerable but unacknowledged literary influence on Eliot. (She mentions at one point that she gave Eliot his title for “The Wasteland,” but the play never acknowledges the formidable hand Ezra Pound had in shaping it.)

We meet them during their genteel courtship, when Eliot is in London to gain her parents’ approval for their marriage; then we see them mysteriously at odds with each other (though they kept up appearances, they were nearly impoverished). Eliot’s literary star rises in tandem with his disaffection for her; eventually he leaves her in the wake of cruel, increasingly lengthy silences.

In effect, the play is a collection of scenes from a literary marriage, to which we’re always arriving frustratingly late. Much is made of Haigh-Woods’ neurotic eccentricity, exacerbated by quack medical diagnoses and prescriptions (at one point she’s told she has “sanguiniferous discharge of the moral barometer”) and the lugubrious pall of disapproval that greeted her everywhere in London’s incestuous literary world like heavy weather. In fact, one of “Tom & Viv’s” peripheral revelations is how dank, insular and even plain silly London’s upper and literary classes could be.

There is also the suggestion that dowager Britannia’s abhorrence of sex played a large part in Vivie’s emotional distress; puberty apparently brought with it an acute sense of embarrassment and shame she never learned how to live down.

In any case, she met her match in the perfect prig Eliot, the American Midwestern Anglophile who, it appears here, rushed to embrace the Church of England as an institutional shrine for his emotional frigidity.

Most of the intellectual flavor and all of the genius of Eliot is left out of “Tom & Viv” (except at the beginning, when he tosses off a few racist ditties to amuse the family, we barely know him as a poet at all). The fastidious careerist completely obscures the profoundly intuitive poet who absorbed the explosive currents of 20th-Century ruin and produced at least one of its seminal works of art.

Hastings’ sympathies are with Vivie (at the end we learn she’s paying for her own medical internment while he remains the executor of the family estate) as he calls “Tom & Viv” “a critical fiction.” As criticism, it isn’t broad or deep, and as fiction it lacks those illuminating touches and juxtapositions that reveal characters from within.

Cynthia David (who resembles a younger Lee Remick) does as well as she can to lend vivacity and color to Vivie, but there isn’t much to hang on to beyond other people’s inferences; though Vivie has plenty of dialogue, she comes off as someone more spoken about than self-revealing. David plausibly manages Vivie’s hysteria.

There isn’t much for Mark Murphy to do about Eliot’s starchy character either. He gives a competent reading, but there isn’t anything he can to do rid us of the notion that Eliot was an acutely disagreeable man. Hastings himself is not a playwright--at least here--who would agree with Jean Renoir’s Olympian notion “Everyone has his reasons,” and since “Tom & Viv” has no dramatic mainspring (its forward motion is chronological instead of generating out of dramatic urgency), it’s no wonder that at the end of the play we’d rather read about Eliot than discuss him. “Tom & Viv” has given us too little to go on.

Olive Dunbar has an appealing forbearance as Vivie’s put-upon mother, Rose. Jack Hatcheson plays Maurice, the foolish brother-in-law; Beth Hogan the pharmaceutical clerk; and Walt Beaver the doddering Edwardian patriarch. The tasteful sets and costumes are by Ariel and Ruth A. Brown, respectively. Robert W. Goldsby directs.

Performances Wednesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays 7 p.m. (except for 3 p.m. performances Dec. 21 and Jan. 4) through Jan. 15, at 12111 Ohio Ave., West Los Angeles (213) 826-1626.