Standing at the window

Jack Hedley played Ralph, an insurance broker forced to the edge of breakdown by the pressures of second mortgage, second woman, second mess. Sylvia (the second woman, ably played by Wanda Ventham) woke up in the middle of the night to discover Ralph standing at the window of their high-rise flat, talking of suicide. The following scene was mainly an extraordinarily well-sustained speech delivered by Hedley with the skill the writing deserved. You needn’t have gone all the way to the brink yourself to see that this was just the way someone on the point of a crack-up would talk, if he could talk at all.

 

Needless to say, Sylvia didn’t quite realize the magnitude of the problem. Nobody ever does, which is why you have to have the breakdown, to tell everyone that it’s not a matter of being reasonable or seeing things in proportion – it’s a matter of getting all the pressures off, now. ‘My poor, poor love. Come to bed,’ cooed Sylvia, but it wasn’t enough. A pair of friends were called in to offer reasonable advice, but that wasn’t enough either. In fact it was that while the friends were talking that Ralph flipped his wig. For Hedley this was the last big scene, since later on he was required to do no more than look dazed. He went spare wonderfully, his mouth going all rectangular like a crying baby’s. Watching him was a rough ride.

 

Sylvia reluctantly committed Ralph into the care of a blunt but simpatico medico who didn’t talk down either to her or to us, which made him almost unique in screen history. But the pressure of seeing Ralph make no apparent progress soon started telling on Sylvia in her turn, so that she was in a bad way herself by the time he was finally allowed out, with her job in jeopardy and no assurance that the same thing wouldn’t happen all over again. In the last scene she was standing at the window – thus completing a neatly circular construction, without allowing us to think that anything had been resolved.

 

Bond captured with praiseworthy accuracy the way someone who abruptly finds everything too much retreats to simple decisions and then can’t even manage those. It’s the near-vertical steepness of the gradient that makes the decline so memorable. Unfortunately (and this the play didn’t touch on) letting go is also kind of fun, which is why some unscrupulous people fake it, spoiling the market for the rest of us.