ARTS Lust and forgetfulness

HILARY SPURLING

Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women, directed by Terry Hands at Strat-

ford, is dazzling to look at. Ruched cloaks, sleeves slashed and puffed, silk sashes, lace collars and high cuffed boots suggest the sumptuous extravagance of the Jacobean court. The costumes (designed, like the set, by Timothy O'Brien) come in brilliant vel- vets—emerald and bottle green, purple and plum, stippled crimson, turquoise and tan- gerine or black, against a sober, brown-and- white chequered floor. The stage is other- wise bare, as it has been all summer at Strat- ford, and backed by the same tall, white screens, the furnishings simple and sparse. Two slender refectory tables, set at an angle, make Lady Livia's banqueting hall: the contrasts of colour and texture—the glinting hard surfaces of inlaid wood, plain or cut glass, and the absorbent pile of vel-

vet—are at once luxuriant and sharply de- fined. Even the gigantic plaster replica of

the Venus de' Medici (looking incongru- ously clumsy in these surroundings, and more than usually like the 'large drawing room ornament' to which Sir Kenneth Clark compared her) acquires, if only by her bulk, a degree of austerity. Certainly

she effectively dwarfs Middleton's busy bawds and lechers milling at her feet. And the statue's tall, oblong plinth has, like the pale walls or the slanting lines of the ban- queting tables, a severity comforting to the eye after so much opulence.

It is a combination which admirably matches the play's opaque and glittering verse, or for that matter the mixture of sensual greed and harsh realism which pre- vails among 'a brittle people' in Middleton's Florence. It is curious to compare his almost casual matter-of-factness with Shakespeare's treatment of the same theme in Troilus and Cressida (which, in John Barton's magnifi- cent production for the same company, re- turns this week to the Aldwych): both plays deal in vice, corruption and betrayal, in both the same 'quiet innocent loves' are destroyed by lechery, both end in barbaric violence. Anything from ten to twenty years separates the plays in time, and a vast gulf is fixed between the temperaments of the two playwrights.

It is not simply that, where Shakespeare chooses a mediaeval legend set among mythical kings and princes in ancient Troy, Middleton's subject is based on supposed fact—the adulterous intrigue and murder which accompanied the marriage of Fran- cesco de' Medici to his mistress, Bianca Capello—nor even that Middleton's charac- ters are recognisably the courtiers and great ladies of contemporary London. Troilus might well congratulate himself, as Leantio does too soon, on his love's constancy; Bianca proves as wanton as Cressida, and quite as abruptly faithless. But, where Troi- lus's disillusionment engulfs a whole world turned sour and murderous, Leantio's has, so to speak, no reverberations. When he accepts public humiliation at the hands of the Duke in the banquet scene, it is not the world which changes but Leantio—from angry resentment to a sullen, rancorous and weak compliance.

Even Middleton's language is self-con- tained, with none of the translucency which glimmers round Shakespeare's images, and at its best when bluntest. The Duke's urb- anity, for instance, when he sets out to seduce and if need be rape Bianca, is no more than an elegantly embroidered setting for this chill statement of fact: 'I am not here in vain.' And Bianca's reflections on leprosy and guilt, after the event are rhet- orical in the extreme beside her bleak acceptance—'Sin and I'm acquainted'—of her own treachery.

This whole transaction—in which, while Bianca is nefariously lured into a closet, her mother-in-law loses pawns at chess to Lady Livia, who serves as the Duke's bawd —admirably illustrates the speed, economy and the almost schematic simplicity of both the play and this production. The scene takes place not in darkness but brilliantly spotlit. On a white stage, the Duke in black towers over his victim from behind. Even his black gloves, clasped across her white dress as she struggles feebly in his grasp, seem huge—a murderer's hands—and his arguments have the ineluctable, sonorous blandness of absolute power. Brewster Mason's Duke is both godlike and, unlike Shakespeare's dukes, perfectly realistic: there was no resisting a Grand Duke in sixteenth century Tuscany. Mr Mason's

Caesar has this weight, but here he has a

grace and a suave, silken sensuality which pervades the entire production like a frag- rance. It is an extraordinary performance.

And Judi Dench most delicately traces the progress of Bianca's self-loathing, from her

first reluctant submission to the moment when she comes running like a lap dog at her master's call.

What saves the play from being simply a sordid domestic tragedy is precisely this

scrupulously clear sight. 'Love's businesses', even at their most squalid, a matter of sat- isfied appetite and money changing hands, are still to be 'carried courteously twixt heart and heart.' Masks are worn without either self-deception or self-pity. Frailty and indulgence—whether Bianca's to herself, or Livia's to her brother Hippolito when, out of pure fondness, she procures their niece to sleep with him—lead to a kind of moral coarsening: not to external punishments (for the carnage of the final masque is no more than a convenient, and spectacular, method of wholesale disposal), rather to Hippolito's heavy words: 'Lust and forget- fulness has been among us.'

Their traces are plain enough in Bianca and Leontio (a somewhat stolid perform- ance by Richard Pasco), or in Susan Fleet- wood's ravishing Isabella, sold in marriage and hardening in the process like Bianca. Her grief and fear at the first meeting with the lewd half-wit for whom she has been purchased contrast sharply with the com- posure with which—after she has learnt to serve her own pleasure with the incestuous Hippolito—she submits, like a parcel of soiled goods, to the bridegroom's inspection of her teeth. Nothing is cheap in Middle- ton's world; neither love nor money serves for long to buy content. And his fastidious honesty is perhaps explored most subtly in Elisabeth Sprigg's Livia. Charles Lamb thought the lady worthy of Chaucer: 'She is such another jolly Housewife as the Wife of Bath,' and admittedly it is the sort of part generally played as buxom, bustling, more than a trifle crude. But Miss Spriggs gives her instead a radiant, full-blown sen- suality, and with it the humour and the aristocratic delicacy of one who both sees and accepts the world on its own hard terms—in short, that emotional and intel- lectual maturity which Middleton so per- fectly expressed in this play and The Changeling.

And so to Harold Pinter's two playlets, Silence and Landscape directed by Peter Hall at the Aldwych in a double bill which sounded at first hearing both ponderous and vapid. But it seems that this atmosphere of spurious gloom is due, at any rate with the second play, to the absurdly pretentious solemnity of Peter Hall's direction.

Both plays are heavily influenced by Beckett and here—since Mr Pinter has never been one for making much in the way of intellec- tual demands—Ellen's observation (in Sil- ence), that she has great difficulty in think- ing, seems a shade too true for comfort. But Duff, in Landscape, neatly combines the hectoring fraudulence of Max in The Home- coming with Sam's complacent meekness: Duff is admirably expert on fishing, dogs, above all on storing beer ('This fellow knew bugger all about beer. He didn't know I'd been trained as a cellarman. That's why I could speak with authority.) This is auth- entic Pinter, and David Waller does his lines no service by delivering them in a hearty rural voice which destroys the dark hints, the bullying or insinuating undertones so efficiently conveyed by Cockneys.

His companion, Beth (Peggy Ashcroft) on the other hand, dreams of her youth throughout in lines which have a pale Georgian charm—witness her last speech: So tender his touch on my neck. So softly his kiss on my cheek. My hand on his rib.

So sweetly the sand over me. Tiny the sand on my skin. So silent the sky in my eyes. Gently the sound of the tide. Oh my true love I said.

And, though her images are trite and her sentiments so insipid as to seem almost wholly bogus, her rhythms are often en- viably assured. But this is the kind of poetry which has little or no meaning beyond the pleasures conveyed by sound. So that, if you disrupt the cadences. as Dame Peggy does by declaiming the whole in a drab

and sentimental wail, you are left with precious little save an impression of unre- lieved vapidity. What effect Landscape might have had, in a production which could achieve a more successful counter- point between the two opposite styles, is impossible to judge.

Meanwhile Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (brilliantly directed by Michael Blakemore at Nottingham, and now at the Saville) should on no account be missed: Leonard Rossiter's vile, infirm and murder- ing Arturo has a frantic humour and a purity of line which make it a performance as indelible as, say, Olivier's Richard III.