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My Darling Clemmie
Posted: 10 Nov 2009
Fringe Studio Tuesday 17 – Saturday 21
“My most brilliant achievement,” claimed Winston Churchill, “was my ability to persuade my wife to marry me.” The historical quip is given body in Hugh Whitemore’s My Darling Clemmie, a one-woman drama about the marriage of Winston and Clementine Churchill.
The British playwright won an Emmy award for his 2002 TV film The Gathering Storm, which dealt with the Churchills’ relationship during the turbulent pre-war years, and saw Vanessa Redgrave in the role that Whitemore’s wife, actress Rohan McCullough, now brings to the stage.
Through the confessions of an older Clementine, McCullough leads us from the moment she – the fatherless daughter of a much-admired socialite – met Winston at a ball, along the increasingly fraught but never bitter path the couple’s partnership took. “What’s fascinating about this relationship, first of all, is that it was love at first sight,” explains the actress, “What I love about it is that he loved her so much. And that she loved him so much. And that they loved each other to the end.”
McCullough has successfully toured the show around the UK, from early last summer (“I call myself a bag lady,” she jokes of her more and more frequent travels). She appeared at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival to an impressed review from the (London) Telegraph’s Lizzie Kirkwood. In an interview with the same paper, Whitemore revealed, “I still think that behind every great man is an even greater woman. I’m not saying that [Clementine] was greater than [Winston], but without her support and devotion, I think his life could not have matured and blossomed as it did.”
‘Behind’ is the operative word in that adage, but Clementine minded less being neglected by history books than by the man she loved passionately and absolutely, as Winston embarked on his formidable rise to power. That she felt the need to write to her husband to receive his attention is sad, and yet, a wonderful thing that allowed Whitemore and McCullough to so carefully craft her character.
The Churchills’ surviving daughter, Lady Mary Soames, gave the pair access to hundreds of the private, “enchanting letters” Winston and Clementine wrote to one another during their 57-year union. Those, along with the books Lady Soames has produced on her parents, were the foundations of Whitemore’s research. They reveal a woman, McCullough says, whose whole life was her husband, whose children, even, never bewitched her like he did. But she found it difficult being married to Winston. She became insecure and jealous, and was very unhappy a lot of the time.
“She is a very feminine, devoted, touching creature, but also very strong,” Whitemore observed, against Winston’s masculine, Falstaff-like “bundle of humanity”. McCullough adds, “I love Clemmie. I love her fragility, and I love her romance, and her social concerns. I admire the way she followed up on all the [promises] she [made] with Winston during the war, how she followed him during the war. She was politically minded, she was loyal, and she really warmed our hearts.”
My Darling Clemmie should provide a fascinating and intimate portrait of the woman behind one of Britain’s most monumental men. And Winston Churchill’s remark, that marrying his beloved Clementine was his greatest success, may prove to be more than just a well- chronicled witticism.
Samantha Leese
Picture credit: Getty Images/Popperfoto
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