The Green Bay Tree by Mordaunt Shairp (review)

In a pivotal scene in The Green Bay Tree Owen (Richard Heap), a reformed alcoholic and now preacher at a local chapel and owner of a small dairy, previews his sermon and contextualizes the play’s title: “I myself have seen the wicked in great power and spreading himself like a green bay tree. . . . Yet he passed away, and lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but he could not be found” (51). This passage is from Psalm 37 and Owen’s analogy is clear: as pervasive as wickedness seems, it can be vanquished. His audience is his grown-up son Julian (Christopher Leveaux), whom Owen had sold for £500 to the dandy Dulcimer (Richard Stirling) twelve years before, and Julian’s fiancée, the practical-minded veterinary-surgeon Leonora (Poppy Drayton). Mordaunt Shairp’s 1933 play takes a different focus from Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), wherein Henchard sells his wife and daughter for five guineas. Shairp hones in on Julian, who is now forced to choose between the dilettantism emblemized by his foster father and the asceticism of his biological father and his lover. He chooses the former and its correlate—money.

Intriguingly, Owen’s biblical and natural allegory parallels Dulcimer’s attempts to tame and control nature. This is evident right from the dandy’s first appearance, where he is trimming flowers for a vase as he waits for Julian. He will explain to Julian why he despises spring: “There is always something terrifying in the remorselessness of nature, something shattering in all this re-assertion of the principle of life” (17). However, Dulcimer is not the only character in the play against nature: Owen and Leonora similarly aspire to re-create Julian in their own, albeit different images. Whereas Dulcimer pressures Julian into choosing between his allowance and marriage, Owen pressures Julian to attend chapel, while Leonora suggests that Julian should be a veterinarian. Both are determined that Julian should leave Dulcimer. Choice is an idea of some complexity, something the play heavily foregrounds. When Julian observes to Dulcimer that he loved the word choose, the latter opines: “Choice is what separates the artist from the common herd. Nobody knows how to choose nowadays. I hope you’ll never forego your prerogative of choice. Never do anything that is unconsidered, or take what is second best” (17).

Julian is quite right when, later in the play, he tells Owen: “You want me to be one thing, and Leo another and Dulcie a third. Well, I’m sick of it! What I should like to do would be to go off by myself away from all of you, and find out who I really am and what I really want to do” (84). Whereas Leonora and Owen seem to support and encourage Julian’s plan, Duclimer insists: “Julian! Come back! You can’t choose! You haven’t any choice! You know perfectly well what you want and where your happiness lies!” (ibid.). But we may think that there are different kinds of want and different kinds of happiness. Choice between the two, and only two, ways of living, Shairp seems to say, enables as much as it denies, prompting gains as well as losses. The play’s strength and its continued relevance rest on its recognition that choice is more about reconciliation than about living disparate and tidy lifestyles.

The Green Bay Tree was a commercial success when it premiered in the West End at St. Martin’s Theatre wherein Shairp’s own stepson Hugh Williams performed the role of Julian, and on Broadway at the Cort Theatre, where Julian was played by Lawrence Olivier. Tim Luscombe took his revival to the humbler though more intimate space of the Jermyn Street Theatre, and his textual trimming reflected some of

Christopher Leveaux (Julian) and Richard Stirling (Mr. Dulcimer) in The Green Bay Tree. (Photo: Gareth McLead)

these changes. Sleeker, with...