Passionate fans of British mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers like to argue that their heroine wrote more like Jane Austin than Agatha Christie. But crime-driven thrillers — especially those featuring a recurrent detective such as Sayers’ dashingly aristocratic Lord Peter Wimsey — never get much critical respect. Their authors have long been obliged to howl all the way to the bank.
Sayers’ “Gaudy Night,” the penultimate whimsical Wimsey yarn penned in 1935, is widely regarded as her best novel. Lifeline’s splendid new dramatic adaptation wisely focuses on its striking complexity. Sayers, a lively proto-feminist, was ahead of her time on gender issues.
“Gaudy Night” (the title comes from a gathering of Oxford alumnae) is the kind of carefully plotted whodunit that will serve as a very pleasing summer distraction for any mystery lover. But it’s also a ripe, smoldering affair, a shrewd tale of sexual repression among dons and a careful probing of the intersection between love and equality. The novel was written at a time when educating women in their own college at a great university was still novel — here, nobody wants to call the cops and give the men more ammunition to decry women’s colleges. Sayers, smartly, made gender the motivation of the whole investigation into a mysterious malefactor attacking the college.
Adaptor Frances Limoncelli has done Sayers before and she’s adept at translating narrative into action. And Dorothy Milne, who directs, finds just the right tone. The show is wry; but never camp. It zips happily along from clue to heartbreak, but the serious ideas are never undermined. In short, this is a long but very smart and entertaining show from the Chicago theater that does this kind of thing with less pretension but more authenticity than anyone else in town.
Stuck in the 1930s, Sayers needed her dashing romantic Lord Peter (here played with self-effacing aplomb by Peter Greenberg) to please her fans. But while he eventually shows up to solve the crime (per the obligations of the genre), Wimsey is not even the protagonist. That role belongs to a writer of detective novels — and Sayers alter-ego — Harriet Vane.
This woman with a past — played with buttoned-down charm by the suave and authentically British JeniferTyler — solves and causes much of the mystery and is the true heart of this story.
And as Tyler and Milne clearly understand, you can see in this character all of Sayers’ doubts and confidence about her era: Can a smart woman still love? Does any man really believe in equality?
Can I ditch Lord Peter in favor of a woman and still sell enough books?
“Gaudy Night”
When: Through July 30
Where: Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood Ave. (the address as published has been corrected in this text)
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Tickets: $24- $26 at 773-761-4477
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CJones5@tribune.com
