Music music music ARTS JOHN WELLS
John Osborne has always been perfectly clear about his attitude to critics: they are irrelevant, sickly parasites, and, as he puts it, the absolute dregs. And he has now reached a stage in his career at which it is possible to sympathise with him completely and to understand his feel- ings. Economically, they can no longer do him any damage. They are not even able to do him much good. The critic can give the management putting on his plays a few glittering phrases to stick up on the billboard outside the theatre, but it seems very unlikely that they will do much to affect the box office receipts, since his audi- ence for the most part is drawn either by his name or by that of the principal actor in each piece. The majority of his income, in any case, as he told the Observer in an interview last week, comes from film scripts and the royalties on his earlier work.
They can, however, still do him damage, assuming that he still bothers to read his press cuttings, by extravagant and irrational praise, which must give him the impression that he is trying to communicate with an audience of fashionable sycophants who happen to be both blind and deaf; by equally extravagant and irrational condemnation in the face of that un- thinking esteem in which he is held by the ticket agencies and amateur intellectuals; and worst of all by gratuitous advice given in the belief that because he is not yet fortunate enough to be numbered among the illustrous dead such advice can in some way influence his future de- velopment as a creative artist.
And despite his disclaimers. it must be evident that a great deal of damage has already been done to him as a writer in precisely these three ways. By the tumul- tuous acclaim that catapulted him as an individual out of the misery, loneliness and squalor of his life among the working class straight into the misery, loneliness and squalor of the showbiz aristocracy, without allowing him time to create his own social independ- ence; by the carping that must inevitably erode the confidence of anyone who works at making something out of nothing. And by the un- wanted advice that has turned him into a self- conscious, prickly, and apparently arrogant dandy.
What is miraculous, and solid gold proof if he or anyone else ever' needs it of his greatness in the theatre, is his ability to turn such suffer- ing into beauty and form in a play like The Hotel in Amsterdam which opened at the Royal Court last week. Written by a good television script writer, the story of a bitchy, drunken middle-aged author working in films spending a weekend in Amsterdam with his upper-class wife, a genial ex-public school film-editor and his wife, and the producer's secretary who has brought along her working-class painter hus- band all trying to get away from the producer, would be banal, irritatingly limited in its range of theatrical conversation, and probably repul- sively boring.
Written by Osborne, it is almost perfectly constructed, uses the same elements with infuriatingly disturbing success, and above all, by thrusting its roots deep down into general
_ . •II1, truth, it becomes, though intensely personal, particular and limited in its literal scope, both part of universal experience and universally comprehensible. The flat theatrical camp of the conversation, the stale clichés, the repetitive and apparently unnecessary obscenities are the contemporary equivalent of ruffles and lace and full-bottomed wigs, but beneath it the tragic humanity of the situation and the situation of tragic humanity continue to burn into the mind days after the immediate irritation at the indi- vidual quirks and absurdities of the characters has worn off.
To take a particular example of the way in which this is achieved, the character of Kt., the film producer they have come to Amsterdam to get away from, is given resonances that echo beyond the confines of the twentieth century office in which we imagine him. When they com- pare themselves with animals like chimpanzees and moles, he is the dinosaur, ancient and un- real. He is the secretary's boss—`your boss, de- prived and rejected of men'—and she herself 'is the real Judas amongst us. she's his secre- tary.' Let him go ahead and get himself cruci- fied,' says Laurie, the main character, 'this time I know him not.' 'He has' they say 'made him- self the object of endless speculation.' He makes them feel second-rate. He creates excitement. 'We're all here because of him' says Laurie 'so let's drink to him.'
By forming these associations very gently in the mind throughout the first act, Osborne adds to and complicates the dissonance at the end of the second when they are told that Kt. has com- mitted suicide. It is not simply a group of seedy film people abandoned in a hotel: it is a more general betrayal, and a mutual betrayal at that. There are overwritten patches in the dialogue —lines like 'Your emotional gunslinging, your shooting in the dark places of affection' sound more like Christopher Fry than the bare and jagged rhythms of Osborne—but he is other- wise masterly in his fastidious selection of words —'Daaarling, don't say tiny baby: all babies are tiny compared to people.'
As in Osborne's earlier work, the pla is cast in the form of a concerto for solo instrument and small orchestra: in this case a heartrend- ingly beautiful cello solo by Paul Scofield, find- ing the richness of his tone somewhere between Tony Hancock and Kenneth Williams, with very good supporting players led by Joss Ack- land as a beaming, chuckling, jolly nice chap providing the at best brilliantly sensitive accom- paniment under the direction of Anthony Page. The music is harsh and discordant in texture but it is its fundamental tensions—Laurie's fear and disgust of the women he loves, his self-dramatising extremes of mood in solitude, his despair among the 'spoiled people' as among his rapacious relations—that give it its greatness.
If The Hotel in Amsterdam is a cello con- certo, Indians by Arthur Kopit at the Aldwych, directed by Jack Gelber, is the Red and White Minstrel Show. Leaning heavily on tatty imita- tion Joan Littlewood with occasional echoes of The Pajama Game, it succeeds in reducing a .. great and noble subject and a respectable coin- •• . • li(JI At(j. .11.. al ?.
any of actors to the level of amateur night with the hippies. Very occasionally the grandeur of the original Indian speeches shows through, but only when Gelber and Kopit run out of gimmicks.
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