Marilyn, Dolly and Dylan
From CARYL BRAHMS
NEW YORK
After the Fall, Arthur Miller's new play in the tent theatre, is what every- one is talking of. They will have seen it, or be about to see it, or refuse to see it, or have read it in the Saturday Evening Post. We have seen the manner of all this often enough — the arena auditorium around the descending levels of the stage; bare, bathed in light, which we .are left to furnish for ourselves. It is the matter of Arthur Miller's untimely apologia for the break- ing of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe that is finally arresting—an apologia which ends, not, for all its sordid detail, in putting Miller in the clear, but in becoming the apologia for that poor, radiant, lost lady, his dead seconde, in the way that a self-righteous politician animadverting against one who is fallible, by overstating his case, angles our sympathies to the culprit. Was Marilyn Monroe (for we can dismiss the dramatist's half-hearted disguise of naming our anti-heroine Maggie) the culprit of the broken marriage or the victim? That the question should be dramatised so soon after her death by the man she married may be—is—in hideously bad and bitter taste. But Miller, writing sparely at all times and superbly for her, has at the heart of his play one speech that goes to the root of the matter: it is in the second act and is spoken by the spokesman husband, for the play takes place in his mind:
You ever felt you once saw yourself—abso-
lutely true? I may have dreamed it, but I swear, I feel that somewhere along the line— with Maggie, I think—for one split second I saw my life; what I had done, what had been done to me, and even what I ought to do. And that vision sometimes hangs behind my head, blind now, bleached out like the moon in the morning: and if I could only let in some neces- sary darkness it would shine again.'
This speech, then, is Miller the human being's answer to the accusation that he has done Marilyn Monroe dirt; Miller the dramatist's answer may be that he has, with the help of a clever actress, Barbara Loden, shown us Marilyn Monroe in the round. And the play itself between the lines proves clearly that life was the archi- tect of Monroe's death. Was it Shaw who said that what can be read between the lines of a play is the only thing worth reading? To re- create a figure as innocent, as truthful, as human, as trusting, as generous, as intellectually inade- quate, as striving, as shrill, as sensual, as hurt,
as ruined, as disintegrating, as Marilyn, is to•fulfil the function of a playwright. Paint we a
desolation, wrote Keats. After the Fall has done just that.
Almost perfectly directed by Elia Kazan, After the Fall is the opening play of what is to become New York's first Repertory Theatre. Its custom- built, steely tent fills the gap between the birth of the general project and the finishing of the Lincoln Centre. It strongly resembles Chichester and from my seat on the side Kazan triumphantly proves my point that the only way to direct Theatre-in-the-Round is to ignore the oval and get on with the action. (Sir Laurence please note.) As a play the piece, suffers from too many, not very newt not very riveting strands. None the less, it would sit down in Chichester well enough and the National Theatre could do worse than buy it for Redgrave-At needs his strong technique for the projection of the weakling to hold it together and make the spokesman, who never leaves the stage, live against the disintegrating poem that is Marilyn. Jason Robards, Jnr., played him earnestly—there is no Other way. That he looked as Lord Snowdon may in fifteen years' time was Nature's nudge to the English Tourist.
The smash-hit musical Hello, Dolly! is our old friend The Matchmaker. It is based on a Victorian farce, The Merchant from Yonkers. We saw it at the Edinburgh Festival some years ago as a straight comedy with Ruth Gordon and Eileen Herlie in Tyrone Guthrie's produc- tion. Directed and choreographed by Gower Champion, it presents Carol Channing, star of stars. This elegant lady looks like a lobster steeped in honey and sounds like a frisky whale with a sore throat. Her curly mouth goes on for ever; so do her hats, her acolletage and her double-thinking. And she had the ploy of the play at the end of her long steel guile-guided linger-tips. Enough, perhaps, to add that she played Lorelei in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
hello, Dolly! is a happy show. 'It throws such a gauze of enchantment before the eyes that while we are there, in Oliver Smith's hat shop or his night club or in the auditorium where Dolly and her chums tread the cat-walk, we have no time to worry that Part One has all the people and the plot and Part Two has only Dolly and a sub--a very sub—Massine waiter's dance-routine, for it figures—and that is the precise word— the scarlet-sequinned and ostrich-feathered des- cent of Dolly down a Mistinguett staircase and out to her adoring house, where she stops the show with her song 'Hello, Dolly!' so that when she takes her final curtain the house just yells 'Hello!' right back. The music is, to put it politely, in- fectious, or, to be crass, reminiscent. Can Jerry Herman be New York's Lionel Bart? One has heard something very like all this before, and before before. And if it comes to London without Miss Channing it could be- a disaster. But why should it?
In a masterly triumph of miscasting, Guinness is appearing in Dylan. Seeing this neat, meticu- lous master of detail fastidiously tackling a swirling drunken genius is like watching a sedate eighteenth-century banking-house clerk signing his name with the customary curlicues and flourishes of his times. No surprise, then, that Sir Alec does not ,impersonate Dylan so much as show us around the man of poetry and self- destruction. Yet such is the innocence, the sim- plicity, the fun and the fury that Guinness finds for us in the poet, that after a sequence or so we recognise the need of the man for the com- fort that drink and women can bring to him, that the voice of the gutter can be kinder than the self-accusation which has blocked his poems for fifteen years. This innocence, this simplicity, is a complex actor's understanding and forgive- ness for 'dirty Dylan,' and we cannot ask more— can your Hamlet ever be your Falstaff? Dylan lives untidily, dies untidily at the end of a sprawl- ing play—how Americans encourage their plays to splay out—After the Fall, Marathon 33, Dylan, spread outwards rather than contract in- wards—self-indulgence is the besetting sin of the dramatisron and off Broadway. The play, which is based on two books, John Malcolm Brinnin's Dylan Thomas in America and Caitlin Thomas's Leftover Life to Kill, reaches intensity in the second part as Dylan, with the death wish on him, riots and despairs to the end. Blowing through the play with the breath of- truth is a splendid actress, Kate Reid. Her Caitlin calls out the play's last word of love and contempt to him in his coffin—`Dirty Dylan.'
In Peter Glenville the dramatist has found the perfect integrator of his widespread biography. His touch on the production is quiet, but always there, smoothing, illuminating. Oliver Smith, with the economy and practicability of one inspired, does a sort of Sean Kenny in what looks like cld iron. In particular, his scene at the airport when Dylan first arrives in America and his stripper-club are ingenious and simple and good. And Laurence Rosenthal's music and dramatic sound are a great help to the play.
These three plays are the meat in the thin Broadway sandwich. Other plays seen or slept through: Barefoot in the Park, The Chinese Prime Minister, The Girl who came to Supper, 7 he Streets of New York, BeyOnd the Fringe 1964, The Ballad of the Sad Café, Marathon 33, Faust (at the Met.), Funnyhouse of a Negro, Cabin in the Sky. And I'm Still batting.
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