Theatre
Fringe benefits
Kenneth Hurren
There has been precious little doing in the West End lately, and it was really only because of the withdrawal symptoms that I even contemplated tottering off to a theatre at lunchtime. I'm strictly a nocturnal man, barely getting last night's lard out of my head or my eyes properly focused before the crack of noon, and these entertainments — besides being often the work of embryonic dramatists but tangentially acquainted with the rudiments of their chosen art, performed by players almost wholly innocent of theirs, and costumed as a result of some uninspired improvisation with old bed spreads — habitually begin only one hour later. They offer, as I've remarked before, a daunting prospect.
On the other hand, you wouldn't believe how fond I am of the theatre; as a matter of fact I have difficulty in believing it myself. Instead of accepting it as a part of , an indolently chosen way of life — a sort of duty, sometimes pleasurable enough to be sure, at other times no end of a drag — I am impelled to the realisation that I'm hooked. Naturally it was deprivation that brought awareness, the craving being more conspicuous in the breach than in the observance. Entering a second week without a new production turning up (in the evening, that is) I felt strangely unsettled, even jumpy, seeking absurd palliatives for my condition like going to moving-picture houses or watching television, and that way madness lies. When I found myself riot only watching a 'Play for Today' (as BBC-tv temerariously labelled some pitilessly introspective bleat about a writer's problems by a writer named Dennis Potter), but actually sitting through the whole thing, glassily and aghast but nevertheless with bovine submissiveness, the direness of my situation became clear. I was plainly in imminent danger of accepting, if not indeed actually mistaking, the shadow for the substance.
It was •in this desperate, fearful mood that I retrieved from the wastepaper bin the bundle of invitations that flow in regularly from the 534 lunchtime theatre clubs that have sprung up around the town, mostly in public houses, almost threatening the supremacy of the jukebox as a hazard and disincentive to drinkers (and straining the reviewing resources even of the Guardian, whose team — intrepid though they are, gravitating to primitive theatrical outposts from Islington to Shepherds Bush, as eels to the Sargasso Sea — cannot be more than 532 strong). Desperation is not necessarily recklessness, though. I recoiled, for instance, from Wankers, which is on offer at the Swiss Tavern, Old Compton Street, and is written by Jackie Skarvellis, a young woman otherwise employed in the cast of Oh! Calcutta! Some instinct, perhaps some uncanny sixth sense, seemed to tell me that it might not be quite what I was looking for.
Nice, however, sounded nice; and, I'm glad to report, so it proved. It's a monologue by a West Indian writer, Mustapha 'Matura, for a West Indian actor, in this case Stefan Kalipha, who gives a genial account of the experiences in London of a young immigrant who has absolutely no complaint with the friendliness of the natives, and who finds that everybody he is nice to is nice to him in return. This especially true of the girls, and in no time at all the lad has a very good thing going as a pimp. The fact that he has landed in gaol might suggest that Matura has written a bitter little morality piece, but the character's imprisonment seems no more than a stroke of bad luck. I found it pleasant to come upon a work touching upon race relations that is neither. patronising nor tendentious. It's at the Almost Free Theatre 'in Rupert Street, Soho, and if you're at a loose end in the area at the right time of day, and can resist the sauna salons and the 'hospitable calls from upstairs windows, you could do a lot worse.
Still, a monologue isn't quite a play; so on to •the Lamb and Flag in Rose Street, WC2, and Mike Weller's Now There's Just the Three of Us, a title that refers to two reluctantly virginal young men, flat-mates, and a girl who claims to be "always nervous in unstructured situations " but nevertheless adjusts very quickly and is soon confessing an ambition to devote her whole life to carnal experience. She is enthusiastically played by Rachel Davies in whose presence, even at that grotesque hour, my withdrawal symptoms began melting like hot marzipan.
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