Art

Propagating Kultur

Ted Whitehead

4,,,alf-LIfe (Duke of York's) Zings and Clowns (Phoenix) "olio and Goodbye (Riverside) If Julian Mitchell's Half-Life does nothing else, it may make some audiences think twice about the value of the booming academic industry, or at least that part of it devoted to the propagation of Kultur. Sir 1‘1,°e1 Cunliffe, the dying ex-master of an vx.ford college, invites several friends to his Wiltshire manor to help him prepare his Obituary, Or at least to assess what his life has been worth: he has had a successful career as an archaeologist, done some research, published several books, and LaPPears all set up for a cosy retirement; but his conclusion is that it has been a 'half-life', made tolerable only by the fact that it has been shared by his man, Jones, who has also had a half-life. Perhaps the two add up to a le, he says unconvincingly. , His guests are the new master of the college and his wife, whose chief concern is to eLxtract £100,000 from Noel for the new humanities library; Barbara, a woman to Whom he had once proposed; his first favourite pupil, a second-rate character

Whose elevation to the peerage disgusts

11°d; his last favourite, Mike, a physics stu

dent; and an uninvited guest, Prue, radical lawyer and feminist. Act One gives us the intellectual cause of

Noel's s disillusion. His life's work had been he development of the idea that civil iksallon, born in the Eastern Mediterranean, had spread across Europe and even penetrated this barbarous island, as confirmed LY Mycenaean carvings at Stonehenge; and that, in turn, the British Empire had spread 4,,Civilising influence around the globe. But ;Ile premise had been proved false by new techniques of radio-carbon dating, which established that Stonehenge was thousands of Years older than Mycenae. So, Noel a Ph°°eY, culture a fraud, humanism no good. That conclusion is, to say the least, a ,on forced, but at least our interest iS held by the interweaving of the personal and the larger problems.

Act Two focuses on Noel's personal dis1,11usion, which of course has to stem from °Is sex-life. Revelation follows revelation, ocerning his relationship with Barbara, and also with a homosexual student of his

Who had died in Spain and for whose death 11.e. blames himself, and finally with Jones. I didn't believe a word of it, no more than I could believe the third act reconciliation between Noel and Mike and Prue, which ". as them planning a trip to Stonehenge for the midsummer sunrise.

ddn't mind the conscious ambival ence of the piece, which has Noel attacking liberal education before the academics and defending it before the radical lawyer. To some extent these arguments are ad hominem. The trouble is that Mitchell pulls his punch by revealing that what worries him is liberal education for the masses. And he shows not the faintest recognition that the radical populist tradition is at the heart of the old culture: the lawyer's antecedents are in Athens.

It's a play that needs inspiration from Shaw, but takes it from Coward, and then nose-dives into mushy melodrama. The director is Waris Hussein, known for a prizewinning television series of glittering mediocrity about Cambridge, and here provides about the same level of soap opera sophistication. Gielgud exhibits his familar mastery of noble disillusion, though not as yet of the lines. As the lost love, Isabel Dean is beautifully self-contained, and does, her author proud by coating the banalities of the dialogue with ironic charm. It's a tribute to Diane Fletcher's acting talent that while she's on stage one almost believes in the text-book radical, and one could say the same of Lockwood West's touchy manservant. Jane Martin's country-house setting instantly captures English life at this class level, though perhaps it only proves that bringing the action out of the drawing room and into the garden doesn't necessarily bring fresh air into the drama.

John Napier's sets, including swings, toy palaces and giant figures, are the sole pleasure of a Leslie Bricusse musical about Henry VIII and his wives, Kings and Clowns, inexplicably starring Frank Finlay, who looks wrong, sings worse, and is altogether an embarrassment. The six women in the cast fling themselves enthusiastically into this romantic chauvinist smear on their sex. Well, it's only entertainment, isn't it?

At the Riverside, there's a production of Athol Fugard's Hello and Goodbye by the Space Theatre of Capetown. A man alone, on stage, sitting at a table, counting the seconds of his life away; later, picking over the past with his sister, on a stage now swamped with rubbish and old clothing; finally hobbling around the stage on his father's crutches and asking himself is this 'Birth. Death. Both?': it's Samuel Beckett come to Port Elizabeth. Fugard has taken Beckett's existential fret and given it a local habitation.

The piece tells how the sister, now a prostitute in Johannesburg, returns home to claim her share of the £500 given to her father as compensation for a railway accident; but the father is dead, the corn

pensation has vanished, and so, bitterly, she returns to the red lights. After a slow start, it builds up to an extraordinary intensity with its images of predatory family life endured in conditions of Afrikaner squalor. There's not much in the way of social or political analysis here — perhaps inevitably, as the first production was in South Africa in 1966 but the precise accumulation of realistic detail has an overpowering impact. Yvonne Bryceland, directed by Fugard, vibrates with passion and despair, and is finely matched with Bill Flynn as the pathetically vulnerable and tortured brother. Anyone looking for real half-lives should start here.

Pluto Press are issuing a series of playscripts written from a radical viewpoint that should be very useful for amateur and educational production; copies are available from bookshops or at considerably reduced prices on monthly subscription. It is fascinating to compare Trevor Griffiths' muscular, politicised version of The Cherry Orchard with recent productions; and I was particularly impressed with Caryl Churchill's Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, a splendidly clear and dramatic examination

of a rather neglected subject, the revolutionary demands for sexual and economic freedom made by the Ranters and other millenarian nobodies during the English civil war.