User:Mick Aston Davies/Alan Melville (writer)

Alan Melville (1910-1983) was a writer of revue and light comedy. He wrote three revues for Hermione Gingold (Sweet and Low, Sweeter and Lower, Sweetest and Lowest) all of which had successful runs at The Ambassadors Theatre in London in the 1940s. Sweeter and Lower had the most successful run of the three, notching up 870 performances.

After these successes Melville wrote a serious drama: "Jonathan" produced at the Aldwych Theatre in London in 1948, starring Leo Genn as David and Coral Browne as Bathsheba. Taking as its subject the idea(daring for the time) that the Biblical King David was homosexually attracted to Jonathan, and this fact explained the subsequent failure of his marriages, the play was not a success. The Times critic Harold Hobson complained: "The story of David and Bathsheba is told expertly in two verses in the second book of Samuel, chapter xi. Mr Melville takes over two hours to tell it, and succeeds in turning it into a bore." 

Melville regarded this play as his best, but wrote later: "If you write comedy, or try to, there is always one serious play inside you bursting to get out. The best thing is to get it out of the system as early as possible, and then forget about being a twentieth-century Ibsen or Tchekov." 

His later plays were light comedies such as "Castle In The Air" (1949) which ran for a year at the Adelphi Theatre in London, starring Jack Buchanan and Coral Browne, and Simon and Laura (1953) which ran at the Strand, starring Ronald Culver and, once again, Coral Browne. It was filmed in 1956 with Kay Kendall and Peter Finch.

In 1970 he wrote his autobiography Merely Melville (Hodder and Stoughton 1970), where he noted wryly that his work had fallen out of fashion and that he was not in sympathy with modern plays about "battering babies to death in their carry-cots" (a reference to Edward Bond's "Saved".)

References

Merely Melville Hodder and Stoughton, 1970.