GIRL ON THE HIGHWAY
SIR,—I'm deeply grateful to Alan Brien for bringing out bluntly at long last this was a political play and not a dramatised striptease show. But was it really 'a hack translation of a Pravda exposure of capitalist injustice'?
Naturally, as someone raised in the Brechtian theatre, I tried damned hard to do away with pre- cisely those things which the critics so brightly found `missing'—'suspense,' audience identification, 'character development,"the narrative tension of what happens next' and all the other props of the culinary theatre. But the focal point of the play—the fact that the outcome of the trial doesn't impinge on the wife and that the whole display of justice therefore be- comes a farce for her—was expurgated by the direc- tor so that the trial itself was turned from satire to solemnity. The heaviness of the whole thing, which annoyed me as much as it did Mr. Brien, was not in the lines but in the playing. What was written to be played seriously emerged as farce; what was written as satire was played straight. Small wonder that we all came away from it puzzled and unconvinced.— Yours faithfully,
ERNEST BORNEMAN
7 Greenaway House, Boundary Road, NW8
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