Ruthless Truth
Doris Lessing's Play with a Tiger, which has been running for two months at the Comedy,. is , coming off this week, and Siobhan McKenna, who plays the lead, has very properly been be- moaning the fact. But the commercial theatre is a place where vox populi will not be denied, and the truth is that the populus simply has not taken to the naturalism of such playwrights as Doris Lessing, Ted Allan, Arnold Wesker, and others who seem intent on reviving that pre-war sort of vcrismo which tries to get 'life itself' on to the stage. I am still of the view that any attempt to put 'life itself' on the stage in dog- gedly naturalistic terms is foredoomed to failure simply because life is inevitably falsi- fied in the process, however sincere that may be. Indeed, the more sincere the naturalism, the falser may be the effect. This, in my opinion, is the basic trouble with Mrs. Lessing's play, and it is not, I need hardly add, a newly discovered paradox. If art is to be a prism through which truth may be discerned, it must also be a lie. A week or two ago Michel St. Denis was speaking at Stratford-on-Avon about the problems facing many of our younger playwrights. 'Their desire for ruthless truth,' he said, 'and their passion for lucidity and for analysing reality to the bone tend to confine them in their area of daily life, to diminish the scope of their subject matter and bring expression down to the level of naturalistic mud.' This is harshly put, but not unsympatheti- cally, and I think it is true.
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