Arts

The lure of the West

John Spurling People who hear that I'm engaged on a series of visits to provincial theatres tend to make sympathetic noises, as if only masochism, poverty or charity could drive me to it. It is a measure of how much the point needs to be made that, although there may still be some bad old local reps, there is also a whole new network of theatres in quite a different class. I should not be pitied for doing a tour of British cathedrals and I must insist that visiting these new theatres is just as much of a pleasure. Their standard is not, of course, comparable with the remarkable state theatres scattered over Germany, but nor are their subsidies. The basis is there; what is lacking is a little more public money and a much more demanding audience.

A crucial difference, I begin to suspect, between provincial and London theatres is that the former are closely tied to regular audiences. This can make either for a good marriage or a bumpy three-legged race. But however bold the artistic director's own ambitions, his theatre cannot achieve a distinctive voice, cannot rise above local entertainment, without local consent.

Bristol, of course, already has a distinctive theatrical voice. The horseshoe-shaped Theatre Royal has been more or less con. tinuously open since it was built by the Bristol architect Thomas Paty in 1766. Garrick then pronounced it 'the most complete of its dimensions in Europe' and purely as an ancient monument it. is an experience not to be missed. But its particular glory has always been its actors: William Powell, Sarah Siddons, Robert Elliston and William Charles Macready; Kate and Ellen Terry were schooled there a century ago; so were a whole generation of household names since the creation of the Bristol Old Vic Company after the last war. Furthermore the extraordinary success of Salad Days in 1954 has been followed by a steady flow of transfers to London, so that when Richard Cottrell succeeded Val May as director last year he took over a theatre which can only be called provincial in the strictly geographical sense.

Unlike audiences in Sheffield, those in Bristol respond favourably to Shakespeare and other established heavyweights, but the very perfection of their eighteenth-century auditorium naturally imposes certain limits on what can be shown, or at least on how it can be shown. Cottrell's first season in the Theatre Royal, last autumn, was solidly middlebrow (Peter Nichols's The National Health, Shaw's Heartbreak House and Alan Bennett's Habeas Corpus) with one outsider (David Rudkin's Afore Night Come) to which there was a decidedly hostile reaction. My sympathies are with the audience over this particular play (a kind of Cold Comfort Farm without the jokes), but for Cottrell it was a warning shot over the bows.

Not that he repines; he says firmly that 'my responsibility is to my public here' and that as for transfers `I think not of them'. His own career began on the near side of the curtain. He was General Manager of the Hampstead Theatre Club until he directed his first play there ten years ago. He then joined Prospect Theatre Company for three years and was director of the Cambridge Theatre Company before coming to Bristol. His experience has been, therefore, on what one might call the serio-popular wing of the theatre, which makes it likely that he and his new audience will prove a good match.

All the same, his spring season suggests that his sense of responsibility to the public includes some gentle nudging. The Soviet playwright Aleksei Arbuzov is hardly one of the century's more distinguished dramatists, but it was a bold and interesting experiment to present three of his plays at the same time. How splendid it would be to see the same service performed for Pirandello (in new translation), for Schnitzler or Horvath! Cottrell would like to do more of the European repertoire, but does not feel he can count on enough support.

I should explain at this point that he is master of more than just the Theatre Royal. Not so long ago one came off the cobbled street in one of the old parts of Bristol, not far from the docks, into a shabby corridor which led through the street facade into the beautiful periodpiece concealed behind. An equally shabby refreshment-room above the corridor completed the then characteristically English effect of improvised but self-satisfied discomfort, still associated in many people's minds with the whole notion of going to the theatre. Indeed this effect stemmed from the very origin of the theatre, which, opening without having obtained a royal licence, was deliberately tucked away to give less offence to local puritans.

In 1972, the whole surroundings were comfortably redesigned (by Peter Moro and Partners) to include not only the graceful eighteenth-century Coopers' Hall which stood next to the theatre entrance, but also a brand-new studio, seating 150. The New Vic, under Cottrell's management, has already notched up a transfer with the premiere of E. A. Whitehead's Old Flames. But if this is something he 'thinks not of', it is clear that he thinks hard about his overall programme. Bristol audiences have been able to react, violently or otherwise, to a double volley of living English playwrights: Arden, Whitehead and Pinter in

the studio in reply to Nichols, Bennett and Rudkin in the Theatre Royal. Cottrell is also responsible for the 360-seat Little Theatre, a few minutes' walk away, the other side of the City Centre.

By the time of my visit the Arbuzov bonanza was over, giving place to T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party in the Theatre Royal, Ibsen's Ghosts in the New Vic and a classic Victorian melodrama, Lady Audlels Secret, in the Little Theatre.

If, as I believe, the greatest theatrical reform in the last twenty years has been the break with the stifling conventions uf domestic comedy (dominant in this count for roughly three hundred years), then Eliot's plays are instructive examples of an early attempt at reform which failed. Eliot tried to smuggle in myth, poetry and spiritual profundity without attacking the basic conventions of polite conversation, doll's house interiors and characters unaware of the presence of an audience. The result is an uneasy oscillation between triviality and portentousness. The designer of this production of The, Cocktail Party, Fiona Mathers, has pointeu up Eliot's ambivalence by constructing 3 circular open stage within the Theatre Royal's elegant proscenium and furnishing it to suggest a vulgar modern opulence' Denis Carey's cast deal briskly with Eliot's curious little bits of ritual but sink rathe,r heavily into his words of wisdom. This PI" can be made to work, as Sir Alec Guinness demonstrated fairly recently, but 01 perhaps by a subtly ironic approach to a the characters, especially the know-ail: whom Eliot unconditionally approves ° At Bristol they are giving a true picture a certain kind of fashionable sub-intellectu society, but without seeming to be awar

that its pretensions are bogus. h 1

Ghosts had not yet opened, but I vvis could urge everyone to see C. H. Hail,c; wood's Lady Audley's Secret and ti't curtain-raiser by Joseph Stirling CoYne preceded it. From the footlights to the to,_"; theatre proscenium and curtain, from tno live pianist underlining tense moments t rd the set-changes which included a cardb0 h inn bursting into cardboard flames, bee these pieces, directed by John David, We a Saturday night treat. 'I have gained f,,,, point,' reiterates the fiendish Lady Ancir7 as she tips a former husband into a ea,rut; board well or arranges for the incineratics w of two other inconvenient characters. 1 gi,aA so caught up in this two-dimensional '01.he that afterwards even the notice in to Gents seemed to speak in the lied sepulchral tones: 'We have ins° the Electric Dryers to protect you front y,s hazards of disease'. Alas, Lady Ail,e1,1ebis, Secret will be off by the time you red

dra

Cottrell says that there is a distinct try in regional audiences all over the 011511 of and puts it down simply to the effec, tistol inflation. It seems to me that Pr'ore audiences at least are being offered Illfall than enough to keep their minds off the

in their standard of living.