As the original designer of the modern Underground map in 1931, Harry Beck has probably had more lasting and beneficial impact on London’s residents and visitors than most politicians. Unfortunately he’s not well served by this simplistic, 70-minute two-hander, written and directed by Andy Burden of the Natural Theatre Company, chock-full of mugging, direct address and chuntering dimwittery.
Staged in a bland space beneath the London Transport Museum, it’s clearly aimed at family audiences: apart from a midweek opening night, which marked 50 years since Beck’s death, it plays Friday to Sunday. Even the most undiscerning infant, though, will clock that there’s not much exciting ‘truth’ to be unearthed about this monomaniac graphic genius here.
It's performed by Simon Snashall as Beck and Ashley Christmas as his wife Nora, he blinking and blustering owlishly, she plucking at her cardigan and also assaying a series of pompous transport bosses and twittering secretaries. It’s the late 1920s and the couple both work on the Underground and sing in the company choir (it’s not clear which bit, as the diffuse network wasn’t brought under the umbrella of the London Passenger Transport Board until 1933).
When Harry is sacked from his job drawing circuit diagrams, Nora suggests he try his hand at designing stylised posters to promote the tube as a pathway to leisure rather than just a commuter utility. Eureka, his next step is to make sense of the network map, which till then superimposed straggling tube lines on a geographical outline of the capital.
Beck became obsessed with the formal beauty of his “diagram”, the colour-coding and thickness of lines and the badging of intersections, neglecting wedding plans and fertility problems with the long-suffering Nora. Initially paid five guineas for a folding pocket version, he worked largely unpaid for years on large-scale variations as the network grew, only to see it altered and in his eyes vulgarized by a later design guru, Harold S Hutchinson (“Usurper! Pilferer!”).
As someone nerdishly but amateurishly interested in transport, infrastructure and design I enjoyed the history of the tube’s expansion, its developing visual identity and the parallel list of inventions (Nylon, Spam, Frisbees, helicopters) that illustrate the zest for progress of the Thirties, early Forties and late Fifties. I quite liked the recreation of Beck’s map with coloured ribbons criss-crossing the vestigial set, though it’s done for easy laughs.
But the central relationship would disgrace the laziest sitcom, as would some of the jokes. “Cockfosters!” shouts Harry. “Language!” ripostes Nora. The play tritely begins and ends with the couple in retirement in the New Forest, Harry absently mowing patterns in the lawn and feeling a pain that presages his death. Beck posthumously received the recognition he never got in life, but this lame drama does him no favours.
