September 7, 2011

Mike Scialom is mesmerised by a tour-de-force performance from Warren Clarke as Winston Churchill.

THE CAMBRIDGE NEWS, 6 September 2011—A BELL tolls in the opening scene of Three Days in May. Five men are at prayer in front of a map of Europe. A sixth, the narrator – Winston Churchill’s aide de camp, Jock Colville (James Alper) – tells us that Great Britain’s darkest hour is at hand.

It is the end of May, 1940: the enemy is at the gate. On May 26, French premier Paul Reynard flies to London with proposals for negotiations which he puts to Churchill. Dunkirk is the backdrop to the decision that must be taken – does the British Government press on with its resistance to Nazism or does it sue for peace?

Writer Ben Brown suggests, via his interpretation of Colville’s diaries, that this was the moment when Churchill wobbled. I’m not sure that this revisionist interpretation of events is entirely accurate because, although it was certainly the moment when Churchill might have wobbled, it’s not actually clear he did. What he certainly did was give the appearance he could be up for a bit of wobbling so as to snare his key opponent, the foreign secretary of the day, Lord Halifax, who was chief cheerleader for the appeasers.

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How much of this deception was acting on Churchill’s part and how much of it was a genuine period of self-doubt is all about interpretation, and conveying this is a task that would prove to be the better of most actors, but not so here at the Arts Theatre this week, thanks to the superb casting of Jeremy Clyde as Lord Halifax, only bested by Warren Clarke as Churchill.

What Clarke has to convey is the sense of a man who has to weigh up the benefits of a statesmanship which seeks to overrule his gut instincts. He tries, oh he tries – and there is great mirth in his feeble attempts – but you always get the sense that he is weighing up his opponents, hearing them out because he knows eventually he will work out a way to corner them and pour intellectual acid on their defeatism.

Eventually, he unlocks the solution by appealing to Neville Chamberlain (Robert Demeger), Lord Halifax’s key supporter. Chamberlain had himself been Prime Minister just weeks before. With Labour leader Clement Attlee (Michael Sheldon) and deputy Labour leader Arthur Greenwood (Dicken Ashworth) on board with Churchill, Chamberlain alone could split the coalition and divide the country when it was crying out for unity.

Churchill asks Chamberlain for a private meeting before the Cabinet meets to decide whether to negotiate with Hitler via Mussolini. Gently, Churchill leads him to set aside his belief that it might be possible to stop the Nazi machine by negotiation, and realise that, after the Munich “peace in our time” fiasco, the time for appeasement was over.

But of the tender side of Churchill’s nature there is no sign in the Cabinet room. The feral instincts of the born survivor barge the statesman aside and Churchill concludes his duel with Halifax with an enraged, life-affirming battle-cry. “Nations which go down fighting rise again,” he bellows. Churchill is all about the voice and, whether he’s in super-ballistic hairdryer or the curmudgeonly comrade-in-arms mode – and all points in between – Clarke has got it terrifyingly, mesmerisingly right.

Three Days in May is a history lesson well worth the telling even if it relies heavily on its central character’s force-of-nature personality for both its humour and drama. These are the three key days of which Stalin said, as quoted by Jock Colville: “There is no other time when the history of the world depended on the courage of one man.”

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