Theatre
Obstacle Courses
By ALAN
BRIEN Every Man in his TFIEY order these things differently in France—at least according to Cheva- lier Hobson. There the fossilised bones of the classics arch above the actors like cathedral naves and the little mum- mers peep in and out among the giant ribs, echoing the costume, the gestures and the psy- chology of the original players. The stars of the Comedic Francaise or the Compagnie Marie Bell are Method actors trained in a time machine who are continually asking themselves, 'Will Moliere slap my face?' or 'Dare I look Racine in the eye back-stage tonight?' A Negro Phedre or a .bowler-hatted Britannicus or a Tartuffe in a dinner jacket would be genuinely shocking and unnerving. But here, ,the Elizabethans are re- garded as an obstacle course for theatrical com- mandos. Over the obsolete images littering the Salisbury Plain of drama surge the larger-than- life performers flexing their histrionic muscles while the directors scurry along the sidelines hurling in fireworks and smoke bombs to enliven the dull stretches. Only among the schoolboys of Michael Croft's Youth Theatre does one ever discover any attempt at a Pod-like fidelity to the original technique or the Globe manner.
Shakespeare and Jonson played straight would now appear the most pretentious of brighfideas. Yet, personally, I still prefer the British ap- proach. Where I have condemned a Peter Hall or a Tyrone Guthrie, it is for cowardice rather than foolhardiness in the face of action. A play is a play in the theatre. An entertainment is a narrative excitement which grips its audience. Where Mr. Hall and Mr. Guthrie forfeit my support is in their insensitive grafting of bright ideas and momentary thrills upon a text which continually contradicts and opposes their con- ception. It is open to any directors to change and rewrite and rejig any classic—so long as they can convince me that their editing is an improvement.
Joan Littlewood has realised that the great advantage of Every Man in his Humour as a Theatre Workshop production is that there is no danger of the intellectual, bricklaying, bar- brawling author creating an uproar at the dress rehearsal. She has treated Ben Janson with no more, but also no less, respect than she would Brendan Behan. The original play seems to have been little more than a young author's squib at the expense of fashionable Elizabethan psy- chology (the humours were the neuroses of the day), with an occasional revue-sketch swinge at popular authors of the time. One way to project the play would have been a thorough modernisation, with jokes about Professor Colin Wilson and Sir Lionel Bart, Bart., but Miss Little- wood has chosen to preserve the period frame while elucidating and simplifying the contem- porary references. She has been as successful as Jonson's plain-man Priestleyan jocosity has per- mitted her. The plot of the whole citizen square- dance now escapes me, but the first half is prin- cipally concerned with laboriously setting up Aunt Sallies which arc uproariously (an adverb inescapable in describing any Theatre Workshop production) toppled and upended and shattered in the second half.
It has been objected that the Stratford East players have no style—whatever 'style' mean's apart from an actor's consciousness of having played the same role in the same way on a previ- ous occasion. A more valid objection might be that Miss Littlewood's corps of entertainers have an oddly shaky grasp of the social distinctions which graded an Elizabethan society where sump- tuary laws still imposed strict penalties upon a servant who masqueraded as an esquire or a businessman who aped a courtier even in the smallest detail of dress. (Hence the insistent Shakespearian convention of the magical efficacy of disguise.) Every Man in his Humour provides, among the manifold longueurs of the text and the occasional over-heartiness of the business, a more rewarding pleasure than style—it reveals a company where many good actors can be seen struggling through the chrysalis of tech- nique into the colourful individuality of their own peculiar talents. There is Bob Grant—a skeletal grey Othello who doubles as his own lago and with humpe'd back and buck teeth is always in hilarious danger of biting himself in half. Victor Spinetti is a grinning caterpillar from the servants' basement, Roy Kinnear a blubbering baby upstart with a lollypop sword, Brian Murphy a property Pistol with a lively line in cowardly hysterics and Griffith Davies a grumpy shop-steward of the Amalgamated Water Carriers' Union. Stratford. East at the moment is still a gymnasium for actors and they go up the Jonsonian parallel bars and over the 350-year-old vaulting horses with energy, exuberance and occasional unembarrassing prat- fall.
At the other Stratford, a scarcely more sacred cow is taken by the horns in a production of The Taming of the Shrew which engagingly and effectively mixes scholarship with slapstick. Here, too, the audience has been considered be- fore the text and rightly so. There is a lot of sliding down stairs on bottoms, staggering on the edge of balconies, and show-off leaps over re- cumbent colleagues; None of this is anywhere indicated in the play (which also advantageously incorporates scenes from an earlier non- Shakespearian version), but equally none of it contradicts the sense or the mood of what is after all pretty much of a competent pot-boiler. The director, John Barton, has brilliantly utilised the revolving stage and the rabbit-hutch set to give us glimpses of the strolling players conning lines and changing costumes in their behind- , scenes tiring-room. , To judge from some reviews, no critic has ever even heard of a masochistic wife with a cock-of-the-walk husband—as if every marriage today were based on the principles of lbsenite idealism. The Taming of the Shrew is not so old-fashioned and brutally outmoded as it is often pictured. Mr. Barton was right to per- suade Peggy Ashcroft to play Kate as an un- happy man-hater who yearned to be slapped down into yielding domesticity without any winks or nudges to a modern audience. She began a little too hoppity-jumpity, like a stiff marionette, but soon settled in a smooth, irre- sistible flowing performance, glittering with in- telligent insights. Peter O'Toole looked and reared like the right stallion to tame such a sulky nightmare of a bedfellow, but his voice had the curiously hollow, sawn-off deadness of an old record played through a tin horn. It was almost as if his much-publicised nose bob had removed the resonant sounding board which vibrated through The Long and the Short and the Tall. Apart from giving Sly a twelve-year-old child as a wife, John Barton has. moved with extraordinary sureness and confidence through the often tedious tomfoolery of the play and the supporting roles are all played with this company's usual vigour and gusto.
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