Theatre
Oktoberfest (Lyric Hammersmith Studio) Search and Destroy (Theatre Upstairs) Total Eclipse (Greenwich)
Munich memories
Sheridan Morley
Aco-operative (and I would imagine not-for-profit) venture at the Lyric Ham- mersmith Studio brings us the British pre- miere of Odon von Horvath's Oktoberfest, and none too soon. Written in 1931, a few years before the dramatist was killed by a falling tree in the Champs Elysees, it comes to us after 60 years fresh with a terrible topicality.
The setting, as the title would suggest, is the annual Munich beer festival: a Zep- pelin flies overhead, wealthy businessmen pick up newly unemployed girls on the cheap, a freak show competes for custom, and somewhere in the background are sounds of the hurdy-gurdy and the cabaret singers of the time.
This, of course, is Isherwood country, and it has to be said that Oktoberfest is nei- ther I am a Camera nor Cabaret: but in Kevin Knight's agile production (complete with centre-stage turntable) it does have a kind of fragmentary fascination. Social drop-outs and misfits and millionaires are thrown together in a fairground which Hor- vath clearly saw as a metaphor for a Ger- many in both chaos and imminent danger.
His central characters, Kasimir and 'Caroline, are destroyed simply because they cannot find work: as so often with Horvath, no character is allowed long enough on stage for us truly to care about what then befalls him or her, but the over- all effect of strangers hurrying and scurry- ing for comfort as the world falls apart around them is wonderfully symbolised by the ever-turning stage and the contrast between the haunting ballads of the singers and the sordid reality of those to whom the songs are sung. Once again, a small, tour- ing fringe company with no visible means of support has accepted the challenge of a script which ought to have been attempted by one of our subsidised companies years ago.
While dramatists up at the Hampstead Theatre continue a series of plays about the perilous and freaky street life of urban Canada, over at the Royal Court they have become obsessed with the similar dangers of Manhattan. While the main stage con- tinues to offer Martin Crimp's scabrous The Treatment, about how not to get your life turned over into a movie, at the The- atre Upstairs the Court's incoming director Stephen Daldry now presents Howard Korder's Search and Destroy, essentially a contemporary gangster movie made into a studio drama.
What ali these four plays (the two Cana- dian at Hampstead and the two American at the Court) have in common is that they are written in a David Mamet tradition of short, sharp screenplays: scenes fade or cross-fade into each other, dialogue over- laps, scenery is minimal and both pace and mood are those of a low-budget movie.
Except, of course, that we too are on the set: for Search and Destroy it consists of a bare stage with a flying roof, so that as the ropes tighten around the principal players, their space to manoeuvre can literally come down around their heads. The plot is at once complex and familiar: small-time Florida showman tries to escape his debts by turning an evangelical self-help book into a movie — Tear is gonna be very big in the Nineties' — and, out there on Willy Liman's smile and a shoeshine, he is pre- pared to deal with the fixers and fakers and fads that line his path on a nightmare jour- ney into American's criminal underworld. Korder's script veers all over the shop, but it has a gritty, urban strength some- where halfway from Miller to Mamet: it's about the wheelers and dealers who have somehow come off their wheels, and Daldry gets strong reservoir-dog perfor- mances out of David Bamber and a tough, versatile cast: an impressive debut for director and author.
Back in 1968, Total Eclipse was the play that established the reputation of a then 22-year-old Christopher Hampton, some- what to the fury of the Royal Court. They first staged the play, but patently disap- proved of its non-political theme and sub- sequent commercial success. As the current and very welcome Greenwich revival shows however, the play is highly political: it deals with the wreckage of Verlaine's middle- class marriage by the subversive and lusty Arthur Rimbaud, and it also deals memo- rably with the artists as gay outcasts of a materialist society. In Lisa Forrell's pro- duction, Greg Hicks is a powerfully tor- mented Verlaine and Oliver Milburn makes a stunning professional start as Rim- baud.
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