4 R EVIEW
OF THE ARTS
Kenneth Hurren on Peter Nichols's wrong turning
The Freeway by Peter Nichols; National Theatre Company (Old Vic)
The Old One-Two by A. R. Gurney, Jr; Basement Theatre (Soho-Poly)
I knew a man once who had seen half or two thirds of every play in London for nothing, it being his habit to mingle with the patrons who flowed into the foyer at the first interval and then drift into the auditorium with them on their return; but I had not myself even attempted to get into a theatre without a ticket (not, of course, that 1 usually have to pay for them anyway) until last Week, when, between six-thirty and seven on Tuesday evening, Gower Street and its environs seemed to be wholly bereft of unoccupied taximeter cabs. By the time I had trudged through Bloomsbury and Covent Garden to the top of the Strand — where, by tripping an hotel commissionaire and sprinting just a little faster than two old ladies, all with similar aspirations, I was able to reach first a hirable vehicle which was setting down a fare in Aldwych the curtain was already rising on the accouchement of The Freeway.
My tickets for this event had mysteriously disappeared in the post, but I fear I was too embarrassed by my tardy arrival at a professional engagement to present myself at the box office for the issue of duplicates. Instead, perhaps subliminally encouraged by the title of the play, I walked briskly and boldly through the deserted foyer, nipped down to the stalls bar and up the stairs at the other end (as you can see, a geographical knowledge of the Old Vic was essential to my enterprise) and thence into the auditorium without encountering a serious challenge.
I am furnishing you with the details of this discreditable episode partly because it was easily the most interesting part of my evening, and partly to make clear that my low opinion of Nichols's play does not take account of the first ten minutes or so of it which may well be gripping and witty stuff, although, on the basis of everything that dispiritingly happens thereafter, I am bound to say that the odds are against the possibility. I can reassure the National Theatre people that it is certainly not my thought to encourage others to try getting into The Freeway the free way; in fact, I should strongly encourage them to give it a miss altogether, especially if they have admired Nichols's work in the past, for among these — and I am one of them —the sense of disappointment must be almost insupportable. This is a dramatist who has hitherto seemed possessed of as vivaciously original a comic talent as anyone presently operating in the theatre, and it is as surprising as it is dismaying to find that talent — which has risen buoyantly to the formidable challenges of being joyously and inoffensively entertaining even about spastic children and death in a geriatric ward — foundering bleakly in contemplation of the menace of the motor car, which is what The Freeway is about.
At least, that is what it is about on one level. Perhaps fuming frustratedly in his Peugeot in some bank-holiday traffic-jam and cursing the affluence of the age which permits so many other people to have cars to impede the progress of one's own, he has biliously imagined a future in which all but the abysmally underprivileged and handicapped are motorists and the pride of the nation is a vast motorway — the F1 — running the entire length of Britain, Warming to his testy invention, Nichols has further envisaged an eighty-mile jam on this motorway in which the vehicles have been kept stationary for three days with rapidly dwindling food supplies, water meagrely rationed, no civilised sanitation and the general atmosphere of a city under siege. It would plainly be possible to develop the situation
pretty humorously, but Nichols on this occasion seems to be altogether too . embittered (he must have had some really terrible times in the Peugeot), and it is a measure, I suppose, of his desperation — and of the extraordinary fall in his standards of comedy — that he is reduced to the desolate business of trying to get a laugh or two out of people going to the lavatory in rather primitive circumstances.
In the little section of the jam presented on the stage, he offers us some stereotypical caricatures of the working-class and of the arstrocracy, and it is hard to say whether his patronising view of the former or the quaint nainete that informs his disdain for the latter is the more painful. Neither, though, is quite so distressing as the fact that his Fl and the trouble that develops on it are a tortured metaphor for British democracy, class-ridden and acquisitive, careering along a freeway to disaster. He is, of course, entitled to his point of view, but I strongly suspect that this is a case in which one might agree with what he says but oppose to the death his tedious way of
saying it. .
The occasion is not improved, I'm afraid, by a slack and apparently under-rehearsed production by Jonathan Miller in which a great many agreeable players (they include Irene Handl, Paul Rogers, Lionel Murton, Joan Hickson, Rachel Kempson, Graham Crowden and Mark Dignam) seem to be doing their own things with very little concern for the overall effect. Conceivably they are all as stunned as I am by their gifted author's muddled and facetious aberration.
Since I am bound to declare an interest in The Old One-Two, a fifty-minute lunchtime piece at the Soho Poly (I have an intimate relationship with a young woman in the cast), I had not intended to refer to it at all, but it is a neatly constructed trifle treating of, academic conflict in an American university in a manner at once literate and provocative, civilised and amusing, and it would be less than just to the author, A. R. Gurney Jr, not to remark on its superiority to his longer play, Children, seen earlier this year at the Mermaid.
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