When your mayor declares a state of emergency, and you get a rare snow day, it’s time for an old-school reading aesthetic. Hot tea? Check. Cozy blanket? Check. Minor classic that’s been sitting on your TBR for the past three years? Check.
“Stage Door Theatre Breaks in London” by AndyRobertsPhotos is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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I wasn’t terribly interested in Maugham until I read a fictionalized version of him in Tang Twan Eng’s The House of Doors, which had me idly googling to learn more. I was intrigued enough to throw Theatre on my TBR, but to be honest, I’m not sure why I picked that one and not, say, Of Human Bondage. However it happened, today there was finally time for the reckoning, and for a snow-day lazy read, it wasn’t bad.
Julia Lambert, our protagonist, is a prominent actress on the London stage. She and her husband, Michael, co-own and operate the theater where Julia stars in most of the shows. Michael hires Tom, a bashful young man, as their accountant. Tom is besotted with Julia. Julia is amused, but happy to be admired. Shenanigans ensue, and then shenanigans get complicated.
Julia is spoiled, vain, and shallow. Her world revolves around her, and she tends to use people, even people she cares for, for what she can get out of them. She’s not vicious or vengeful, but she can be catty, and she doesn’t take well to competition or being ignored. She’s also incredibly anxious about getting older, and needs constant reassurance that she’s still a smoke show. If you must have likeable protagonists, Julia is not your girl.
If this were a 19th-century novel, say, an Edith Wharton, Julia would get comeuppance for her shenanigans in a socially painful way. Because this is an inter-war 20th century novel, however, Julia gets to be vapid and shallow without learning a thing. Even after her son Roger reads her for filth near the end of the book, the worst that happens is that her feelings are hurt for a little while, and then she goes right on back to being Julia. I kept waiting and waiting for something horrible to happen that would teach her a lesson, but Maugham has shrewedly given us the lesson the entire time: everything is artifice. Everything is illusion. Everything everything absolutely everything is a lie.
Which is exactly the sort of message you’d expect from someone who drove an ambulance in WWI.
Maugham also wrote over 30 plays, and had a lot of experience with the theater biz, so the entire novel does come across as a bit “Tell us how you really feel there, Willie.” Theater takes almost 300 pages to get its point across, and it does so in a slow, meandering way. And yet, I found myself drawn along with it. Maybe because it was the perfect day to stay indoors and dive deeply into a style and type of writing that died out years ago. Maybe because the sheer level of 5-D chess Julia played in the course of a normal day was fascinating. Who can say?
I don’t think this will be most people’s cup of tea, unless you are a former theater kid who will understand perfectly every single thing that happens in this book. It’s incredibly well-written, though, and if you’re the kind of person who feels you “must” read classic fiction, you could do a lot worse. Will I read more Maugham? Probably.
But only on snow days.