The grand theatre panic ARTS
HILARY SPURLING
The works of Fernando Arrabal—sadistic, necrophiliac, hopefully obscene, a compound, in short, of every cliché in the business—aim at 'that complicated reaction described by M Jacques Guicharnaud as 'the sacred horror that springs from the black sanctification, through ritual, of the evil within us.' Jerome Savary clearly knows the feeling: his enormous pro- gramme—nearly two feet long—for M Arra- bars Le Labyrinthe bears no legend save the word PANIQUE, placed inconspicuously in minute capitals in the top left-hand corner.
Le Grand Theatre Panique is in our midst, ais guests of the International Theatre Club at the Mercury. And none too soon. For M Savary's reaction has grown alarmingly familiar to the London playgoer in the past few months. Take, for instance, last week's openings. The Foundations at the Arts harks fondly back to Galsworthy's smug vision of the trenches and the London poor in 1917. The Dancing Years at the Saville recalls that Ivor Novallo, too, had qualms when his heroine interrupts her jovial warbling to remark on something uncommonly like a nip in the air in 1939. And even Gals- worthy's coy, nauseating complacency is rivalled by the slick cynicism of Sammy Davis Jr in Golden Boy at the Palladium—Broadway's coarse answer to the slums of Harlem in the 'sixties.
`The THEATRE is dead. We must Acr,' says a scrap of cardboard propped behind the bar at the Mercury. Inside the theatre, gravely twirling couples waltz among the seats; an enigmatic negro in chains stalks past with powerful, dangling wrists; or a procession winds by, with brown paper parasols and a large white goat, to shrill, oriental pipe music. Strange hums are heard, and a small, sad, shabby mute wrestles in a cleating with a wind-up gramophone. A lovely lady dressed only in frayed, greenish ropes holds a lengthy, passionate and quite inaudible conversation on the stage with an engagingly civil, patient hero in a beard and manacles; one of the many charms of this production is precisely that it is practically impossible to make out any of the words.
One has the impression of an intricate pattern of events, glimpsed dimly and whose signifi- cance is too delicate to grasp : elusive, tantalis- ing, somehow mysteriously dislocated. M Savary himself, in plum-red tights and orange brothel-creepers, conducts rapid changes of pitch and tempo from the back of the theatre. Considering the extreme banality of the text, this is a manner from which we could learn much; even The Foundations would respond to this kind of treatment.
Occasionally a coherent phrase emerges— delivered generally in tones of rare politeness by the naked lady or the bearded hero, return- ing from ministering to a gibbering maniac, also naked save for his jockstrap and a rakish, piratical hat, who seems to be dying of thirst in one corner of the stage. Their conversation is punctuated by his screams, always promptly followed by the soothing sound of water flush- ing at the gallon, and from time to time by a plump, beaming and melodious soprano in black velvet—producers might note especially the intelligent economy of this episode. One has the identical pleasure from lovely June Bronhill at the Saville, only where Miss Bronhill is trapped helplessly among wobbly cardboard tree-trunks and a gaggle of ungainly, spry and toothy matrons who dog her every step, M Savary's seductive lady needs nothing but a spotlight to burst into mellifluous song.
Occasionally, too, one can piece together something which roughly corresponds to Arra- bars text—when the dying pirate, for instance, finally strangles himself in the lavatory chain, or traces of an incident which suggests that our bearded hero is in trouble. Certainly a group at one side of the stage—goat, small boy, tali, sonorous negro in a sheepskin over green boots and a curious ruched pink silk garment— seems to be investigating some sort of crime. `How lamentable!' ert'claims the negro-, whose speeches are given in English for no apparent reason save the characteristic courtesy of this company. A girl with violently frizzed hair, rouged cheeks and heavy, strapped high-heels, like one of Allen Jones's dolls, rolls over on her back, straddled legs poking stiffly in the air. But the trite whimsicality of Arrabal has vanished, along with his arch obscenities, in. the toils of an imagination infinitely sharper, more humorous and bold.
Take the trial, for instance, which winds up the proceedings. Here again the words are barely audible, or only as the curt, official murmuring which accompanies what is evi- dently a momentous and sinister event. The judge—M Savary again, still in tights and brothel-creepers but with what looks like an eiderdown bundled round his neck—swarms deftly up a rickety ladder to a chair, strapped insecurely to the ceiling at the back of the theatre, and unfurls his bundle which streams twenty feet below him to the floor. Our hero's terror and bewilderment are pitiful to see. A spotlight, trained far above this mighty robe, picks out the judge's stern, pale face and glitter- ing eyes. The plaintiff, gazing trustfully up- wards, expounds his innocence with a confi- dence not justified since the judge, now swinging upside-down above us, suspended by one foot from the beams, is clearly in a hanging mood. So much for your sacred horror.
And, if there is one thing in London to match the precision, wit and radiant inventiveness of this entrancing spectacle, it is the Bunraku National Theatre of Japan at the Aldwych. These ancient puppets dominate the theatre, whether crouched with foreheads knocking on the ground or rearing four feet high in their gaudy, elaborately folded silks. We start with the 'Attack on the Palace,' from the famous Forty-Seven Loyal Ronin: never was anything more fearsome than Lord Moronao's impotence and rage, as he clicks ferocious bushy eyebrows or taps a testy finger on his knee. Listen to the appalling groans of the Joruri which accompany this grim mime—the guttural, strangled raucous sobbing of a warlord weeping from sheer fury. And see the frightful consequences—Lord Han- gan, so patient and so foully taunted, provoked to a moment of ungovernable anger and driven, in turn, to a ceremonial suicide. Compare the solemnity and piercing sorrow of Lord Hangan's disembowelling in the pre- sence of his household—pausing for an instant to close his delicate small eyelids, before he steps serenely on to the ritual white cloth—with the couple who leap to their deaths in The Miracle at the Tsubosaka Kannon Temple. Watch the delicacy, the absolute decorum and spontaneous fitness of their gestures—the husband who shoots his cuffs as he prepares composedly for death, or his wife, dinging with one hand to a tree, as she peers at his body far below her and shields her face with the other trembling sleeve; Or watch her,-after her dance of wild despair on the cliff's edge, as she leans, panting, on one wrist to catch her breath. Seeing these two crumpled bodies tossed from the precipice, one feels there is nothing to compare with the horror of a puppet's death. Or, for that matter, with the exultation of their dance, when, as we leave them, their bodies are miraculously re- vived—two minute, whirling, stamping figures leaping like maniacs in a rapture at the bottom of a gorge.
Not that the programme deals entirely with mighty passions. On the contrary, -there is the lady sewing—tugging at an awkward stitch, biting the thread off neatly in teeth too small to see, and putting away the needle, with an absent pat, for safety in her elegant coiffure. There is the serving man consumed, indeed positively rattling, with envy of his master's exquisitely shy, fond bride. Then there is his own hideous shrew, bunching absurdly tiny fists or kicking up her heels as she lunges after her reluctant groom. And one notes_ with interest that, in Japan, a truly revolting ugliness means simply round eyes, big feet, a fair pink skin and rosy apple cheeks. -
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