Cinderella stories are all the rage at Christmas. This one, first seen in the West End in 1940 and later filmed with Barbara Mullen and Michael Redgrave, is a slender fairytale by the forgotten Scottish playwright Aimée Stuart and is chiefly remarkable for a heroine who combines a dogged resilience with a romantic soul. It’s a peach of a part into which Mairi Hawthorn, only recently out of drama school, gratefully sinks her teeth.
Jeannie starts out as a drudge for a tyrannical father but, when she comes into an inheritance of £200, decides to blow it on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Vienna where she is befriended by Stanley, a washing-machine inventor from Yorkshire. Their paths diverge when Jeannie is beguiled by a parasitic Austrian count and Stanley by a svelte blond mannequin. The outcome is predictable: Stuart relies heavily on the assumption that foreigners are untrustworthy and I found myself wondering whether a penny-wise Scot like Jeannie would be quite so carefree with her cash.
The piece is, however, elegantly staged by Nicolette Kay with a set by James Helps that shifts easily from a Scottish stone kitchen to a luxurious continental hotel. Hawthorn also captures exactly Jeannie’s mix of inbred puritanism and latent hedonism. Fiercely clutching her umbrella as if to ward off advances, she tells Stanley: “We never speak about sex in Scotland.” At the same time, under the influence of Strauss waltzes and flattery from the aristocratic smoothie, she blossoms into a figure rather like Eliza Doolittle preparing to go to the ball.
Even if the play belongs to her, there is good support from Matthew Mellalieu who lends the Yorkshireman a Priestley-like stolidity, Patrick Pearson as the silver-haired count and Madeleine Hutchins as the silky fashion model. You can see why the play was popular in 1940 in that it offered an escape from reality and evoked a lost European lifestyle. Today, although dashingly directed and blessed with the sound of Jack Buchanan reedily singing Goodnight Vienna, it looks a trifle musty.
At the Finborough, London, until 22 December.
