The Trials of Arabella
The Trials of Arabella is a seven-page melodramatic play written by thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis in a two-day "tempest of composition" during the summer of 1935. The play tells the story of a heroine, Arabella, whose reckless passion for a wicked foreign count leads to her contracting cholera and being deserted, only to be saved by a prince disguised as a doctor, whom she marries on "a windy sunlit day in spring." Briony designed the posters, programs, and tickets, constructed a sales booth from a folding screen, and lined a collection box in red crêpe paper, all in anticipation of a single performance for her brother Leon's return. She intended the play to celebrate his homecoming, provoke his admiration, and guide him away from his "careless succession of girlfriends" toward the right form of wife, one who would sweetly request Briony's services as a bridesmaid.
Composition and Artistic Ambition
Briony wrote the play as her first excursion into drama, having previously written stories. She found the transition effortless, a relief from writing out "the she saids, or describing the weather or the onset of spring or her heroine's face." The play was intended to inspire "not laughter, but terror, relief and instruction, in that order." The news that her cousins from the north were coming to stay prompted this leap into a new form. Briony's mother, Emily Tallis, read the seven pages in her bedroom and declared the play "stupendous," a word Briony insisted be quoted on the poster. This moment of praise was the project's highest point of fulfillment; "nothing came near it for satisfaction, all else was dreams and frustration." The play's rhyming prologue conveyed a message that "love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed."
The Failed Rehearsal and Casting Crisis
The rehearsal, held in the nursery, was a disaster from the start. Briony's cousins, the ginger-haired and freckled Lola, Jackson, and Pierrot Quincey, were reluctant participants, refugees from their parents' bitter domestic civil war. Lola, fifteen, maneuvered Briony into giving up the role of Arabella, claiming she could do it well and that it would be "the only good thing that's happened to me in months." Briony, feeling the disadvantage of being two years younger, could only nod in miserable assent. The twins, Jackson and Pierrot, were unable to act or even speak their lines with any sense, delivering them in a "stricken monotone" or a "roll call of words." Lola spoke her lines "correctly but casually, and sometimes smiled inappropriately at some private thought." The rehearsal was further disrupted by Jackson's bed-wetting, which required him to wash his own sheets under Betty's supervision, consuming two hours of rehearsal time. Briony, feeling her creation being steadily wrecked, eventually abandoned the rehearsal entirely, drifting out of the nursery without explanation.
Abandonment and Artistic Revelation
After leaving the rehearsal, Briony went to the island temple, where she slashed at nettles with a hazel switch, imagining each nettle as Lola or the twins or even playwriting itself. She decided that "playwriting itself became a nettle... the shallowness, the wasted time, the messiness of other minds, the hopelessness of pretending—in the garden of the arts, it was a weed and had to die." From her window in the nursery, she witnessed the vase-breaking incident at the Triton fountain between her sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, a scene she misinterpreted as a proposal of marriage followed by a drowning. This moment prompted a profound artistic revelation: she realized she could write a scene from three points of view, showing "separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive." She understood that "it wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you." This insight marked her transition from melodrama to "impartial psychological realism."
Legacy and Final Performance
The play itself was never performed in 1935. Briony later told Leon that the play had fallen apart, lamenting her failure to stage it. However, sixty-four years later, at Briony's seventy-seventh birthday celebration at Tilney's Hotel (the former Tallis House), a group of children, including a ginger-haired Quincey descendant, performed The Trials of Arabella. The boy recited the prologue with "thrilling clarity," and the performance concluded with the heroine and the medical prince linking arms and speaking a final couplet: "Here's the beginning of love at the end of our travail. / So farewell, kind friends, as into the sunset we sail!" Briony, watching, reflected that she had "not traveled so very far after all, since I wrote my little play. Or rather, I've made a huge digression and doubled back to my starting place." The play, which she had dismissed as a childish melodrama, ultimately became the frame for her final act of atonement: allowing her lovers to survive and flourish in her novel.
