Television Two Go Mad in Dorset: Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May
Half a century on from its debut on the BBC’s Play For Today, Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May is as razor-sharp as ever. Happily untethered to its grainy, mid-seventies atmospherics and archival curios, it has since crystallised for many as the definitive autopsy of a uniquely English brand of arrogance. In the insufferable Keith, Leigh bottled a rigid, middle-class pomposity that feels as cringingly familiar now as it did all those decades ago: haven’t we all, at some point, been held hostage by a Keith Pratt?
The sing-song title and jaunty on-screen font are really serving up a theatrical feint, for this is a deceptively complex beast, an urban psychodrama transplanted to the pastoral stage of an ostensibly innocent if slightly brittle camping holiday in Dorset. Forensic in parts, meandering in others, it’s one of Leigh’s most assured works: allegorical, perpetually flirting with absurdism, a film whose themes only grow more pointed with age. This potency, through Leigh’s methodology, is a huge triumph of the cast, principally Roger Sloman (as Keith) and Alison Steadman (his wife, Candice-Marie), who inhabit a vast, unstated history. Once they are decanted from their bulging Morris convertible, a stifling domestic gravity tugs at their every interaction.
At its heart, Nuts in May is a brutally comic fable on the fallacy of control. For Keith, performatively declining the wrong sort of eggs and milk from the camp shop, control manifests as a martyred self-discipline that radiates from his core. Laminated itineraries must rule the couple’s days, the Country Code is internalised as a quasi-religious doctrine, and their freshly curated pitch is achingly just-so. However, when outsiders (or in other words, folk of differing backgrounds and personalities) come to violate his territory, Keith’s central processor is hit with the one thing that it cannot compute: indifference. And so it is, through gritted teeth and tidal waves of passive aggression, that his attempts to impose correctness on those who simply do not care for ‘the rules’ are doomed, his prized composure set to wobble and ultimately collapse entirely. Not that it is Keith’s beliefs and world view that fail, we note, rather his power to suppress unruly moving parts. Like a despot whose subjects have simply stopped listening, he unravels before our eyes, charging headlong into a Lord of the Flies-type battle for ideological supremacy that he can never win.
Steadman’s Candice-Marie, meanwhile, emerges as something far more than the twee, needy pushover suggested by the opening frames. As the film goes on, doubt creeps in: is her complicity less a sign of devotion and more the position of a handler? When Keith knocks off Corfe Castle point-by-point, slavishly following the guide-book instructions, she critiques his lack of spontaneity. At the campsite she remains a willing accomplice in his cloying folk lyrics and painful musical whimsy, yet at the same time she subtly absorbs and manages Keith’s attempts – especially visible through a modern lens – to establish coercive control. Relentless diktats on everything from Candice-Marie’s gait to how she must eat a mouthful of dinner reveal Keith’s worrying, but in this case futile, aim: the systematic confinement of his wife’s autonomy. (Keith’s “seventy-two chews” is not wholesome advice, but the assertion of bodily admin rights.)
This ambiguity to the marriage is certainly a result of Leigh’s improvisational approach, which allowed Steadman to create a brilliantly opaque character who develops a quiet but rebellious liking for an interloper, the laid-back, personable Ray, who becomes a mirror for Keith’s increasingly totalitarian traits. To Keith, ordinary people are mere human static, their presence an irritating noise that he would dearly like to filter out. Ray’s world, by contrast, is free of endless corrections and moral monitoring, and Candice-Marie tellingly abandons her infantile subject matter for their exchanges. Are her child-like behaviours, then, solely deployed to placate or even manipulate Keith? Prudence, the fluffy, anthropomorphised hot water bottle to which she makes Keith bid good-night, is a more significant symbol than one might think: while Keith may control the logistics, Candice-Marie holds the emotional cards. This discloses a certain steel and raises questions concerning the real power balance in their marriage. Such cloudiness is the magic of Nuts in May. As Candice-Marie plays along with Keith’s compiled list of grievances against the other campers – the smoking, the radios, the lounging and general ‘horseplay’ – we must decide for ourselves: are these really shared concerns, or is she just prodding the bear? “They’re not taking any notice, Keith! They’re ignoring you completely!”
The Dorset landscape stands as impassive witness when the nagging drip-drip of profoundly unwelcome incomers finally cracks Keith and he screams “get back to your tenements!” For all that Keith likes to be seen affectedly admiring it — he appears to hold Corfe Castle in nigh-on farcical reverence — all this ancient majesty is never allowed to dilute or override his banal concerns. His pilgrimage to the Banbury Stone is a case in point, simply an exercise in gatekeeping, stripped of wonder and joy, the artefact repurposed as Keith’s own intellectual property and a monument to himself. Even his disgraced self-eviction from the campsite cannot draw a line under his campaign. Keith merely hits reset and starts again, attempting to rebuild control through a series of power-plays, like his bullish acquisition of new camping land or his desperate appreciation of Candice-Marie’s colourful scarf blowing in the wind. These are mundane acts rebranded as a defiant foraging for purity.
It would take a heart of stone, though, not to feel for Keith upon his abdication as Lord of the Campsite. As Candice-Marie maintains a watching brief, a passing policeman sternly upbraids him on the matter of their over-stuffed car. It’s a burning irony: Keith is subjected to the same pedantic scrutiny that he delights in inflicting on others, but by a legitimate arbiter of the law. His regime in tatters, the couple trundle off once again into expansive, timeless Dorset, a terrain which treats the playing of dreadful madrigals, posturing, and self-righteous hiking with the prehistoric apathy that they deserve. Against such scale, Keith’s position is exposed as a pathetic wail for significance in a world that does not require his input.
In the often grey-tinged world of Mike Leigh, Nuts in May is something of a sun-drenched outlier. It avoids, say, the visceral grit of Naked, the emotional nostalgia of Career Girls, or the frayed social dance of Abigail’s Party, and instead provides a precise dissection of – and a salutary warning concerning – certain humans’ need to classify, order, and colonise the business of living. For Keith Pratt the wild Dorset landscape, his marriage, and indeed existence itself are not things to be experienced, but subdued with an itinerary and a packable, laminated card. In a 1970s ‘back-to-the-land’ cultural phase – Tom and Barbara’s ever-so-faintly smug drive for self-sufficiency in The Good Life, Reggie Perrin’s escape to the Jurassic coast of, coincidentally, Dorset – Leigh posits a different suggestion with Nuts in May. Distanced from the regulating structures of urban life, suddenly uprooted to a supposedly peaceful place of comparative freedom, Keith not only falters but looks to be one step away from an appearance on the evening news.
As we bid farewell to Keith and Candice-Marie, they appear strangely destined to continue pootling around on this trip for all eternity, embedded in film, moving from one scene to the next as Leigh’s appointed ciphers for the more groan-inducing facets of Englishness: the weaponised politeness, the “it’s for your own good” paternalism, the belligerent assumed authority of the amateur. Yet there is empathy, too. Leigh doesn’t just mock the Keiths, he understands their fear, the suppressed undertow of terror: the dread of one day waking up to find that all the rules have disappeared.--Neil Jackson
