Stranger things at Stratford ARTS
HILARY SPURLING
Never was a guide more affable, spryer or more stoutly British than the poet, ancient Gower, stumping forward with one skinny finger raised at Stratford, to conduct his audience on a tour of foreign parts; and seldom can foreign parts have seemed quirkier or more dubious than in Gower's tale of Pericles. Tall screens enclose the stage to make the grim and sinful court of Antioch; half-naked courtiers in loincloths stalk on bare feet over a glittering paved floor; dull silver, grey, oatmeal, the gleam of gold or torch flames are framed by pale, towering palace walls. In the midst of this barbaric spectacle stands the masked princess, with hair plaited in stiff metal spikes and—dismal tokens of the king's ferocity—the small, white, severed heads of former suitors.
Pericles flees to Tharsus, where the people have turned cannibal from want. His minions, trundling gifts and trophies in a gilded cart, pour a glistening stream of grain into a huge bronze dish. Again, the scene is dun-coloured save for the yellow glint of corn and metal. Already there is something dreamlike about this setting, which matches the plot's perilous ascents and swift reversals; just as the scanty garments—soft, bulky nappies worn with leggings which reach to just below the groin— emphasise how small and sinister is the gap between prosperous Antioch and starving Tharsus, between Pericles coming triumphantly ashore with gold and grain, and Pericles cast up, in the next scene, naked and destitute on the beach at Pentapolis: 'A man whom both the waters and the wind In that vast tennis court hath made the ball .
And the stage itself at Stratford is the sea's 'vast tennis court': an empty box with sides rearing out of sight and a bare sandy floor. The blank, bleached walls dwarf the human figures; a line of tarry nets stretched across the stage makes the foreshore where our hero receives rough comfort from Pilch and Patchbreech, the fishermen, and a rusty suit of armour from the sea. Here Pericles is wrecked and wrecked again, here Thaisa's body is cast 'scarcely coffin'd in the ooze,' here her daughter scatters flowers—and the blues, yellows, marigold and purple of Marina's flowers are the first streaks of colour against the neutral shades of dry bone and shells and stone—and here, on Neptune's feast day, Marina is redelivered to her father on board ship.
And the formal severity of the setting power- fully reinforces Shakespeare's metaphor : it makes a brilliant background for a play whit dips unevenly from Gower's brisk, choppy narrative—'Till fortune, tired with doing bad/ Threw him ashore to give him glad'/—to Pericles' storm music: 'The seaman's whistle/ Is as a whisper in the ears of death/Unheard'; from Pilch and Patchbreech to Thaisa's terrible childbirth at sea; from the -gaudy courts of Antioch, Tharsus or Pentapolis to the simplicity of Thaisa's wakening, cast up early one morn- ing from the sea, or the elusive echoes which time has given to her question, 'Did you not name a tempest, a birth and death?' Other echoes cluster round Marina, strewing flowers like Perdita only this time for a grave; next moment, caught in the plot's wheels, she is walking with her murderer on the sea's margent, abducted by pirates, given out for 'dead and thrown into the sea,' sold to a brothel in Mytelene. . . .
Strange things happen at sea; and one of the strangest, in this breathtaking production (by Terry Hands, designed by Timothy O'Brien), is the fact that, in a play saturated with storm and shipwreck, there is no seaman's whistle, let alone gull's cry, not so much as a single howling wave or gurgling ripple. So much for Stanislaysky, who so exasperated Chekhov that he swore to write a play beginning: 'It's wonderful, this calm. No birds, no dogs, no cuckoos, no owls, no nightingales, no clocks, no sleigh bells, no crickets . ..' And yet, nearly seventy years later, it is still amazing to find a storm as palpable as this one which has no truck with the regulation seagull.
It is, indeed, only at Stratford that one realises how firmly our notions of theatrical prettiness—Regency style, Restoration, Shakes- pearian or whatever—are based, not on how people may have moved or spoken in a parti- cular century, but on stale conventions fixed on our stages thirty years ago or more. If the masque-like courts of Antioch or Tharsus bear no relation to these notions, it is because the Royal Shakespeare Company's two homes are pretty well the only theatres in the country which reflect the preoccupations—with space and light and form—of contemporary painting. Hence in part, no doubt, the company's ex- hilerating energy and imagination. But one has only to think of, say, Peter Brook's Oedipus —which. precisely because it took and for the most part carried off so many risks, veered alarmingly at times towards the trite or senti- mental—to realise both the dangers and the difficulties of what is happening at Stratford.
For, considering the formidable influence of dead styles on the English theatre, it is easy to see how what one may call the Hallmarks of an earlier regime at Stratford—the pinched, mudspattered soldiers, worn leather, battered implements of the Wars of the Roses—might have become cliches as familiar as the Stanis- layskian seagull or the Brechtian cart. Instead of which, the company is steadily evolving to- wards a stylisation at once extravagant and austere: Pericles, for instance, shows all the old flair for bawdy (witness the chubby, wooden Priapus erected to tempt 'the lewdly inclined' in the market place at Mytelene), and for spectacular fights (which have grown with time
more than a trifle recherché—witness the 'tourney for the lady' at Pentapolis, fought with elegant aluminium tubes by as bizarre a col- lection of 'knights' as one may ever hope to meet); the production flows according to the cinematic techniques evolved by Peter Hall on John Bury's revolutionary sets for Shakespeare's history plays; but the set, like Christopher Mor- ley's for Much Ado last year, explores the basic staging invented by Mr Morley (who is the RSC'S head of design) for the Royal Court's Macbeth and the Aldwych's The Relapse.
It is not simply that these variations on the bare stage, backed by screens which shape or frame the action, are immensely pleasing to the eye; they provide the only escape, short of a vast building programme, from the theatre of the immediate past. Which perhaps explains why this production dives so easily from the present back to Shakespeare's storyteller. mediaeval Gower, moving gravely in and out among the characters of his weird, oriental fairyland—and why the feats and shows, the 'minstrelsy and pretty din' which Gower fondly promises seem as bewitching as they must have done on the play's first night some three hundred and sixty years ago. For this quaint figure (a beautifully judged performance by Emrys James), so absurd and yet so fetching with his censorious tags and lamentable, jingling rhymes, has something of the conjuror's spell as he ushers us into his hodgepodge of a story.
It is an extraordinary feat to have woven a whole of such singular lucidity from this con- fused and tantalising play; and the production rises magnificently to the 'rough and woeful music' of the last three acts. Ian Richardson's Pericles, stern, patient and unmoved in extreme adversity, becomes a kind of archetypal hero (though Mr Richardson cannot quite suppress the faintest suspicion of Joseph Surface hover- ing over his mysterious redemption, and over the family reunion at the end). Susan Fleetwood plays Marina and Thaisa, mother and daughter as twin versions of one theme, with the most exquisite delicacy. Even the strangest incidents —the session in the brothel (a superbly raddled bawd by Brenda Bruce), Marina dragged round the' market place and finally impaled on the effigy's wooden phallus—are based on scrupu- lous attention to the text: since Marina, for all her stainless, miracle-working chastity, has a rough tongue and a shrewd knowledge of the world. And Miss Fleetwood, oddly dressed in a loincloth and flimsy veil, still somehow manages to suggest the marble limbs and fluttering draperies of a Renaissance painting—so that Thaisa's return to life reminds one of the wakening of another statue in another play. The Winter's Tale is prbmised later in this Stratford season, long may it continue, and may it end as well as it has begun.
And so to Nottingham, where Michael Blakemore's production of Brecht's The Resis- tible Rise of Arturo Ui—a production first seen at Edinburgh last year and now recreated at the Playhouse—translates us to the vicious holes and corners of Hitler's urban gangsterland: a world of cold, smiling faces, bullets, licking flames and natty double-crossers spewing death. David Graham, Christopher Benjamin, Denis Quilley are magnificent—respectively venom- ous, bland and brutal in padded suits and two- toned shoes—along with other gangsters too numerous to name; Cherith Mellor makes a delectably sly gangster's moll. But the centre piece of this production is Leonard Rossiter's Arturo Ui: an atrocious, rabid, shambling figure, uncannily familiar with his small
moustache and yet here illumined in a strange, bleak beam of irony. If this is one of the great plays of the century, then Mr Rossiter's Chicago Hitler is a creation fit to match it, and should, on no account be missed.
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