Bertie Changes His Mind: A Review of the Jeeves Classic

Bertie Changes His Mind: A Jeeves and Wooster Tale

Another cheerful joke in the Wooster canon, this time narrated by Jeeves himself. This performance, recorded in front of a live audience at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham by Martin Jarvis, depicts Bertie Wooster's desire to adopt a child. His plans are abruptly thwarted due to an unfortunate incident at a remote girls' boarding school, where he was asked to give a guest conference but proved grossly inadequate for the task.

To make matters worse, he was caught passing cigarettes to one of the girls, Peggy, whom he had befriended with the hope of returning to the school without being caught (and later stopped) by the formidable director, Miss Tomlinson. Bertie had no choice but to retreat back into his life of bachelor nights, bathrooms, and a whiskey and soda served at eight o'clock.

The Wodehousian World

"Bertie Changes His Mind," as with all Jeeves stories, lies in a never-never land of interwar Britain, where the wealthy youth are perpetually threatened by romantic, gorgon-like older women. Miss Tomlinson is simply another incarnation of Aunt Agatha. The story dramatizes Wodehouse's nostalgic memories of school life, where education takes second place to friendship and charm (remember the Psmith stories?). The story is fun, but it never really departs from standard Wodehousian fare.

Performance and Characterization

What interested me in this reading was how Martin Jarvis's characterizations faithfully conform to our mental images of the characters:

• Bertie: Given a nasal, upper-class whine.
• Jeeves: Spoke in dulcet tones, acting as the voice of reason to keep Bertie's erratic patterns under control.

These stereotypes were formed many years ago, when the lamented Ian Carmichael and Dennis Price starred in the BBC's The World of Wooster, and were invoked again when Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie revived the stories during the 1990s. Would it not be nice, just for once, if producers gave a different spin on the material—for example, making Bertie less of a chump and Jeeves less of a wiseacre? Unfortunately, this was not to be in Rosalind Ayres's production.