Theatre
Ruff and Tumble
By PETER FORSTER A Midsummer Night's Dream. (Stratford - upon - Avon.)— The Rough and Ready Lot. (Lyric, Hammersmith.)— Swinging Down the Lane. (Palladium.) BORED as one has too often been by fairies who are (ALAN BRIEN obviously actors, and actors is on holiday) who are obviously fairies, Peter Hall's new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream comes as a pleasant surprise. 1 read that the idea is to show how the play might be per- formed by members of an Elizabethan house- party in their own great hall : be that as it may (and I defy anybody to guess it, nor does it matter very much) the set has a minstrel's gallery which, when necessary, turns transparent and becomes a ravishing little forest, connected by a staircase to the straw-covered floor below; though this is set at such a steep rake that at first we fear Mr. Laughton may roll right down into the audience.
But then it becomes quickly apparent that while most of the audience has turned up to see this great actor make his Stratford debut, Bottom the weaver is not one of his most successful ventures. He looks right, with a cowl of ginger hair, and his face is all Bottom, but the plain fact is that he is just not funny enough. I have laughed much, much louder at Robert Atkins and Sir Donald Wolfit, and there was a memorable time at the Victoria Palace when Bud Flanagan played the part straight and was as near Shakespeare's moon-faced clot as anyone could have wished. Laughton is far subtler; with the film-actor's attention to tiny detail, he builds up a sulky, pulling lout, but until the very end, when he dies for Thisbe in a bout of frantic wriggling which riotously takes off Sir Laurence's expiring Richard Ill, he seems oddly lacking in the true comic spirit. Nor is he much helped by one of those curious accents he likes to assume nowa- days, in this case a kind of mangled, mid-Atlantic cockney with rustic edges.
But long before this final scene, the emphasis and focus of our interest has passed from the rude mechanicals (among whom only Julian Glover's red-handed Snug the joiner is really satisfactory) to the young lovers and the fairies. The former are rather too strident and unvaried, but they have a ruff-and-tumble vitality, and like everyone else in the cast they speak the poetry (has any play more cadenzas?) with excellent, new-minted clarity and feeling. The fairies have been conceived not as the usual poised and pretty immortals, but as a bunch of barefoot, wilful and childish little sprites, with a dusty, silvery, butterfly look as if inspired by Titania's own lines: 'The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees, And for night tapers crop their waxen thighs, And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes.' This is rather hard on Oberon, who needs his overtones of Prospero, but it enables Mary Ure to score a hit as Titania. Miss Ure spent so long ironing Jimmy Porter's shirts that one was beginning to fear lest her early sparkle might have become extinguished; but this Titania is a most fetching, comic little blonde waif. In sum, an inventive, youthful production, and I did not miss Mendelssohn at all.
At the Lyric, Hammersmith, is a poorly named curiosity, The Rough and Ready Lot, which really takes us right back to lic%rmini. Here indeed are all the hallmarks of Hugoesque drama—the arena of moral conflict, in this case South America just after the American civil war, and the problem of whether to destroy a monastery in the army's path, though it might just as well .have been, say, Ireland during 'the Troubles,' or Scotland after the '45, or any one of a dozen other settings which enable the dramatist (the Poet, Hugo would have said) to pose the conflict between Good and Evil, Principle and Expediency. Here are even the big set-piece speeches, reflections on death, and the like. It is all quite pleasantly old-fashioned, well put together, and lacking only a few sparks of . real imagination or inspiration. The various viewpoints arc capably conveyed by a choice little cast led by Jack MacGowran, Patrick Allen, Alan Dobie and Rupert Davies, under Caspar Wrede's direction. It will be interesting to see where Mr. Owen goes from here, whether on to Tom Robert- son or back to Beaumarchais.
But for the moment what matters is that (by the enterprise of the 59 Theatre Company, who are doing so well at the Lyric) his present play has been seen. The particular problem -for theatre dramatists nowadays is, more than ever before, how to get their work produced. In this connection anyone interested in the theatre should obtain Richard Findlater's pamphlet for the Fabian Society on The Future of The Theatre, an admir- able survey, full of fascinating information, with detailed proposals for helping the theatre which are no less impeccable because no politician will take the slightest notice of them. One of Mr. Find- later's most depressing and important passages deals with the limited opportunities for dramatists under the current system which demands long runs—a state of affairs that has apparently led John Whiting to give up in disgust for the moment. Here again television drama scores, for at least a man like Sydney Newman at ABC is using new work all the time and taking chances on new names. These are seldom big names, because the money is less good than in the theatre, but I would guess that the first television company to dip into its profits to the extent of offering payment for a TV play on a scale comparable to that in the theatre or cinema would be amply repaid in quality. Meantime, as Mr. Findlater shows, the greedy, short-sighted men who control most of the commercial theatre continue to abet a state of affairs which will eventually do them out of business, and us out of respect-worthy live theatre.
At the Palladium, Max Bygraves is on better form than I have ever known him, the most engag- ing of the new-style comics, good-humour-man rather than loudly funny, minimum of make-up, a pleasant line in lilting songs, and a knack not only of getting on good terms with the audience but of making the audience feel friendly towards each other. He is the be-all of a summer show which could do with one other first-rate act, and less of the Peters Sisters, to bolster it up, though there is a charming Henley Week scene with the lads of the chorus all looking properly Leanderthal.
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