Freddie’s on the floorboards

Press, 19 February 1983, Page 16

Freddie’s on the floorboards

At Freddie’s. By Penelope Fitzgerald. Collins, 1982. 182 pp. $18.50. (Reviewed by Joan Curry) Freddie runs a school for child actors in a seedy part of London, close to the theatres and within a barrow ride of Covent Garden market. Her establishment is run down, her pupils are steeped in make-believe, specialise in Shakespeare and pantomime, and only sometimes behave like children; and Freddie herself is not above being creative in matters of fact.

The crisis at Freddie’s involves money, or rather the lack of it. Members of the staff are badly paid, but treated with majestic tyranny. Two legs of the grand piano have sunk through the floorboards because there is no money for repairs to the fabric of the building. There is a rule about walking across the upstairs hall in case the flooring there should also give way, and everyone must scuttle close to the walls for safety. The school has been supported for 40 years by the generosity of theatre people who remember Freddie, or have come to believe that they remember her. She has

become a British institution and therefore to be cherished and Freddie, scarcelymoving out of her chair, ruthlessly manipulates events to protect her school from creditors and from the challenges of a rapidly changing world. The children, single-minded in their career ambitions and naive in matters unconnected with the theatre, move impertinently through the book, counterbalancing the ponderous Freddie, but at one with her in their determination to survive.

Into this imitation world comes a man who wants to invest in a business. He also wants to reorganise things, adjust priorities, put matters on a businesslike footing. He has no feeling for Shakespeare. He is constantly enraged by the way things are done, or not done, at Freddie's, but is determined to overcome the opposition and take over the administration of the school. The novel is concerned with the clash between Freddie and the businessman, and the irresistible force meets the immovable object in a richly infuriating climax, exquisitely built and staged.