ARTS Worldly goods
HILARY SPURLING
Spring, which brings Sweeney to Mrs Porter, also brings the theatre of the world to the West End: Peter Daubeny's fifth international season opened at the Aldwych on Monday last, with a second visit from Prague's Theatre on the Balustrade. Remembering last year the delicate circumstances surrounding the Israelis and the Greeks, it is a fine thing just now to find the Czechs among us. But the importance of this season—whether political, practical or on the mystical plane—has been sufficiently spelt out in other years; what has not perhaps been so much stressed are the spectacular delights, the rich and heady, subtly varied pleasures of this amazing annual orgy.
The pleasure comes and goes, of course— going sometimes so swiftly that one has barely time to savour it before the next is in our midst. The Noh Theatre of Japan, for instance, hailed last year with some misgiving but already by reputation a power in the land, grows in retro- spect still more delectable and weird. Remem- ber the great Manzaburo Umewaka as Zeami's dancing angel—a frail and stately maiden whose spell is if anything increased by the glimpse of heavy masculine jowls behind her tiny, rose- pink, china mask. Never was anything so exqui- site, or so elegantly feminine, as the infinitesimal stamp of this actor's white bound foot which punctuates the dance. And remember the scarlet spider shooting out his web of sinister, curled and snarling paper streamers. Fairy-tale images—the entrancing, flirtatious airiness of The heavenly princess, the bloat malice of the spider frozen with immaculate precision for five hundred years against their abstract setting.
Or, at the opposite extreme, remember the short, stocky, lissom harlequin (Piccolo Theatre of Milan) tumbling in sunshine against a bright blue sky, who so miraculously conjured the trafficky streets, the stench and broken bottles of low life in renaissance Venice; the ravishing grace, the intellectual agility and practical busi- ness sense of Marivaux' characters (Comedic Francaise) working towards a marriage bargain in eighteenth century bourgeois France; or the dusty heat and venomous political intrigues of urban Athens (Green Art Theatre in The Frogs) some 2,000 years ago.
And here the simultaneous translation system (all done by wands, so that what is Greek to me at one ear is English at the other) is a positive advantage over English-speaking productions. Aristophanes, for instance, so woefully tedious in translation, becomes in modern Greek as gay as we are told he was—and as rude, with a tart, exhilaratingly impartial malice, towards politi- cians, warmongers, literary bigwigs: dan- gerbusly sound, in short, on blisters of all kinds. Pirandello is another whose genius is not so much muffled in our clumsy native versions as translated into a grinding bore. The Compagnia dei Giovani, in Rules of the Game last year, brought home at once the limpidity of the Italian and the fact—which makes translation so particularly perilous and English productions as a rule so dismally ingenuous—that no one, in the sophisticated and brutal world of Pirandello, ever by any chance does anything so dangerous as to say what he means or mean what he says. Hence, in this production, the ferocious concen- tration, the sense of devious cruelty, of skirting savage lusts and jealousies beneath a surface of somnolent urbanity. The two run parallel and never meet, so that it is only by collecting the merest nuance, the least languid feline stiffening of an eyelid—and by reference to the barbaric outcome—that one has any notion what has happened: destruction, murder and revenge, plotted and carried out before our eyes without so much as a bloodstain or the faintest gurgling scream to stain the luxuriously glittering apart- ment in which the sordid tale unfolds.
If Pirandello in Italian is a revelation, simi- larly with Beckett in French—remember Made- leine Renaud (Theatre de France in oh, les beaux fours), buried up to the neck in scorching desert sands for ever, and still placidly sorting the contents of her handbag in sweet, vacuous —indeed imbecilically stubborn—defiance of the facts; and, no doubt, this year we may expect startling new light from Ingmar Berg- mann and his Swedes on Ibsen.'
Besides Hedda Gabler in prospect, we have in ten days' time M Jean Louis Barrault and that fabled pair, Mesdames Feuillere and Renaud, in his Theatre de France; the Com- pagnia dei Giovani return next year in Piran- dello and meanwhile there is the Rome Stabile company—Mr Daubeny's fourth from Italy, each so far more entrancing than the last. Then there is the Abbey, on a second visit in Bouci- cault's The Shaughraun, and, while waiting for the Noh again, the Japanese Bunraku puppets—whose portraits gleam already with a radiant malevolence in the Aldwych foyer. Any- one making for the box office, beneath the gaze of these remarkably sinister orientals, may care to ponder the fact that this season costs us nothing—the whole, lavishly subsidised by foreign governments, being run on less than it would take to mount a straight-six-character- one-set-play in the West End; and rather less than half of that contributed by the taxpayer.
Meanwhile the Czech mime company, in- stalled last Monday with a production called The Clowns, weave a tangled web of good and ill, shuttling between the sinuous elegance of their movements and the abysmal triteness of their thoughts. Ladislav Fialka, as the white- faced clown, has a suggestive face and, when not glumly simpering, a nice line in piquant situations. Stropping a knife, for instance, on his slippered sole, or rashly challenging a sav- age circus lion, he is delicious. But the overall impression of shapelessness, and of a dogged roguish smugness, is a strain we have come to recognise in modern productions from Eastern Europe: a kind of sentimentality normally associated only with your routine Broadway musical. Perhaps in each case the answer is the same.
'The high standards of British theatre—and consequently of British audiences' are two of the many reasons given by the Compagnia dei Giovani for their pleasure in this season; if they find a sophistication to match their own, we may feel rightly flattered. And Mr Fialka and his troupe plainly used to catering for an aud- ience by comparison inexperienced and none
too bright, may find their visit useful.
Not that we have any call to be complacent. Trevor Nunn evidently had much the same audience in mind when preparing his King Lear, which opened last week at Stratford. After a glittering and powerfully formal opening, this production settles rapidly for an enfeebled, often vulgar and certainly anachronistic, naturalism. Compare, for instance, Mr Nunn's sadly literal handling of Gloucester's blinding with Peter Brook's treatment of the parallel scene in Seneca's Oedipus three weeks ago: Mr Brook has found, for this part of his production, an austere and disciplined formality which makes for intense concentration on Seneca's ghoulish and minutely detailed barbarity; Mr Nunn treats us to a messy, ugly, inordinately prolonged and weltering bloodbath. Or take the last meeting on the beach between Lear and Gloucester (Eric Porter and Sebastian Shaw), here reduced to a nattering confrontation between two chilly, asthmatic, unremarkable and dull old men, who never should have ven- tured out in such shocking weather. Mr Porter has neither the range nor the bleak imagination to match his author, and lapses into a monotonous delivery not untinged with self-admiration. And where the grandeur and depths of Shakespeare's poetry are filtered, as in this production, through a mediocre mind, the result is at best tedious, at worst offensive.
Apart from a fool (Michael Williams) who, like the whole production, starts brilliantly and peters out, there are in fact only two good reasons for dropping in at Stratford : Susan Fleetwood's Regan, a delicate, vicious and fair-skinned murderess—an unexpectedly subtle touch, throughout, to stress the emphasis in the text on the youth and• tender nurture of Lear's daughters; and Norman Rodway's com- pact, sardonic and fiercely intelligent Edmund.
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