Theatre
Shock Proof
IIAMBER GASCOIGNE
By
Baal. (Phoenix.) — Jackie the Jumper. (Royal Court.)
BRECHT'S first-performed play, Drums in the Night, took a favourite sentimental theme, a soldier from the war return- ing, and treated it in a deliberately sordid fashion.
Baal, written earlier but un- performed for five years, also assaults the con- ventional idea of the romantic, but in a directly °Pposite manner. It seizes on the sordid, the amoral, the shocking, and treats it with all the exuberance, the indulgence, the whirling self- Confidence of romanticism. Nostalgie de la boue iS a mere trilling with mud. Baal wallows. It is a great outburst of irresponsibility, carrying every indulgence to the extreme. Baal himself is drunken, dirty, randy, wild and joy- fully rude to the pompous. These qualities are just the basic uniform, the cap and gown of the poete maudit from Villon to Dylan Thomas, but Baal deliberately pushes himself farther. When a rich lady falls for him he makes her Meet him in a sordid bar and takes special pleasure in forcing her to kiss a drunken stranger. When two nymphets visit him together, he orders them both into his bed at the same time He forms a homosexual attachment for a man and then murders him—ostensibly in a flash of jealousy over a girl, but also, one feels, to achieve the extreme degradation, the com- plete anarchistic freedom involved in killing one's lover. Jean Genet, who has modelled his life on principles similar to Baal's, has described to his Journal of a Thief how he forced him- self to betray his best friend to the police so as, to prove himself independent of any social props or obligations. Not all Baal's indulgences are so black. In one town he uses the greed of the farmers to stage a massive practical joke: he offers an unprecedented price for bulls, so high that 1101304 queries his credit and the farmers of seven villages set about driving their bulls to tuvvo. Why cause this chaos? asks his friend. :Et will be an impressive sight,' replies Baal.
Where else can you see so many animals at once?'
Baal wants to be big, free and shocking— 'I want to be an elephant,' he says, 'and pee in the circus when things go wrong.' Much of the Play is obviously designed to shock the audience (an ephemeral pastime more likely to succeed in 1918 than now), but its more lasting value is that it still seems a very direct and Personal expression of the mingled joy and
disgust of a young poet. Baal has a joyful ex- uberance, but he is also haunted by death, by decay, by stinking corpses of discarded mistresses floating away down an endless river. At times the images become rather literary, but when Baal sits beside the corpse of a woodcutter, a friend of his, and reminds it with drunken passion that it will rot, the effect is authentic and powerful.
Peter O'Toole makes a superb beast of him- self as Baal, but I found Harry Andrews rather too stiff, rather too symbolic a figure as Ekart, his friend. The love between them was played down, making the homosexual lines in the text stand out awkwardly, but apart from this one oddity William Gaskill's direction is flawless and he must now be established as our fore- most diredtor of Brecht. Jocelyn Herbert's sets are perfect (when have they ever not been?). A love scene by a river is set simply by lower- ing one long weep of willow in front of the plain white cyclorama which was Brecht's own favourite background.
As a practical footnote, the one blemish on Miss Herbert's stage pictures is the dozens of bright yellow lines and triangles which show the stage-hands where to set the props, but which look as though the willow has been shed- ding its leaves for days. These familiar marks are invisible from the stalls but they always offend me when I sit in the dress circle or higher, where the floor forms almost as prom- inent a part of the set as the walls—and who would leave such instructions visible on the walls? I have never noticed the problem in other countries (Brecht, in fact, was so well aware of the prominence of the floor that he covered it in some of his productions with beautiful and extremely expensive bamboo matting), but directors and designers here, par- ticularly of revues, seem to accept these messy little marks as a necessary blemish of the theatre. Is there really no alternative? Something like luminous paint, perhaps, visible to the stage-hands in darkness but not to us in the full light?
At the very end of Gwyn Thomas's Jackie the Jumper there is one superb piece of fable- making. A group of oppressed steelworkers have kidnapped the three local representatives of authority, the priest, the county sheriff and the colonel of the militia. To humiliate them they make each do some appropriate work, for all to jeer at. The sheriff is set to digging, on the grounds that he has sent so many to their graves. The crowd gathers round, but within moments he has unearthed a hoard of silver, hidden there by monks centuries ago. He shares it round and the people, all but their leader, follow him singing down- the hill, back to their old lives of oppression.
Up to this moment there has been a flood of Welsh words, many of them splendid but with no real dramatic core for them to cling to. Unfortunately the director, John Dexter, seems too much in sympathy with his author's mood; he presents the play almost as a pastiche of poetic drama, instead of trying to rescue it from Mr. Thomas's poeticism. It opens with the workers waiting for the arrival of Jackie, their vagabond hero. They are grouped on a hillside like some deported Greek chorus and when Jackie arrives it is typical that he should leap into view and then sink to his knees among them, raising his eyes skywards before uttering a word. The ridge of greenish brown matter, designed by Michael Annals to represent the hillside, crunches like crumbling rusks when people step on it.
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