Theatre
Back to School
By ALAN BRIEN The Keep. (Royal Court, Sunday.) —Julius Clesar. (Queen's).
GWYN THOMAS has several qualities we need in the theatre today. His language is unruly, ex- uberant, high - spirited. Each character harnesses his metaphors three a- breast like Jimmy Porter —trampling down the syntax and leaping the grammar in the excitement of the chase after a Particularly offensive image. The others watch With the bored, critical eye of circus hands who acknowledge even the most dazzling acrobatics With a laconic, reluctant nod and then suddenly shoot out a foot for the quick, unexpected upset. The technique depends on a rhythmical balance of inflation and deflation. The breath is continu- ally drawn in for a long, swollen aria of exaggera- tion and digression which always ends with a splutter of anticlimax. Mr. Thomas is half school- master and half schoolboy, so that the spiky, show-off vocabulary of the pedantic adult is fuelled by the mischievous, intoxicated fantasy of the adolescent. It is a method ideally suited to the semi-professional funnyman who must beat his choir of laughers through arpeggios of amuse- Mein with every twitch of his baton.
Mr. Thomas displays another valuable quality. He has a talent for evoking a world beyond the backcloth peopled by awkward and peculiar grotesques. It is a Llareggub whose inhabitants actually work and are paid, and who scheme and flatter and dream about work and pay. They are not relatives of Dylan Thomas endlessly trapped With their tails in their mouths like herring in a Cycle of drink and sex—if anytiling they are rather tinder-hormoned. This is a provincial life, edited and caricatured for broad comic effects, after, palzac rather than Zola.
Why then, after the Aelighted guffaws and the sYmPathetic giggles, do we feel still cheated of a genuine dramatic experience? Gwyn Thomas, like John Mortimer whom he resembles in approach, has set the scene for a play but forgotten to ring LIP the curtain. The Keep, like The Wrong Side of the Park, is a situation which is frozen in rehearsal stage. An illusion a action is gained by the movement of the words from lips to ear, but the characters remain glued to their chalk marks. The wings are stuffed with anecdotes which are occasionally wheeled through for our entertain- ment. Each person is described with a Aleth of extravagant and telling detail to every other per- son. Everyone has his turn as a comic raconteur. nut the narrative never begins to move. The People never touch and contact. It is like a Son et Lumiere farce with voices and lights playing over a realistic waxwork tableau. Mr. Thomas has been given a warm and gener- ?us reception, both in the theatre and in print, °Ill I hope this does not persuade him to stage The Keep in its present form. The language is too rich and doughy for dramatic digestion. He must have the courage to be flat and even boring occasionally—phrases which look intolerably dull to the eye can strike the ear like a fist when they spring uncontrollably from the situation. He should throw away some of his plums in the knowledge that only what is precisely rele- vant to each character has any real meaning to the audience. He must resist a joke and risk a blush. Laughter, as anyone who has listened to the embarrassed sniggerers at The Caretaker knows, is often a defence against feeling. The Keep is born from a genuine insight into that paralysis of the will which afflicts people of talent and ambition tied to the roundabout of small- town intrigue and local patriotism.
The figure of Mam, the contralto angel who escaped from the Hallelujah chorus of her family only to dominate them from beyond like an idol in a shrine, is a powerful and ingenious in- vention. But the puppets will not begin to dance until Mr. Thomas has stripped them of their load of jokes, ceased to patronise them in his own mind as pathetically genial caricatures, and started to care what they feel about themselves and their neighbours. Otherwise The Keep will remain, even when as well and as warmly acted as it was last Sunday, simply a static excerpt from a literate, garrulous, kitchen comedy for intelli- gent television viewers.
Julius Cresar too often seems a conspiracy with- out roots, a plot which lacks a plot, a clutch of characters in search of a denouement. The action appears to be a thin, mechanical thread to link set speeches and stagy quarrels. One of the advan- tages of Michael`Croft's Youth Theatre produc- tions is that they always reduce the actors to their proper size—knee-high to Shakespeare. The poetry becomes visible again as that strange life- giving solution in which players, ideas, metaphors, epithets and rhythms all fuse together. For in Shakespeare, a single key image may be more important than all the sculptured profiles, smoky rhetoric and musical murmurings of the human figure and voice. The Youth Theatre Julius Clesar had no single actor whose performance would remain branded on the retina or ringing in the inner ear. But set in modern dress in a tropical city bubbling with unrest the play suddenly developed a real impetus and direction. The mob were no longer half a dozen rhubarb-criers in the background worried by the management of their togas but a jiving mass of some fifty ravers, 'Teds and wild ones to whom Pompey was as square as Ca;sar. The patrician leaders were no longer haloed with the phoney glitter of Roman legend —they looked as if they deserved the dirtiest word in Shakespeare's vocabulary, 'politicians.' To see the police badge and the pin stripes, the red tabs and the gold braid, decorating the men who were plotting murder was to feel something of the guilty thrill with which the Elizabethans must have watched such defiance of God and his divine pecking order of society. Like most in- experienced, and some over-experienced, actors, John Shrapnel as Cesar and Allan Allkins as Cassius tended to seize up in one attitude and in one expression while they concentrated their ener- gies on hurrying out the words as if they were loading them into a quick-firing mortar. David Weston as Mark Antony and Neil Stacey as Brutus, though generally lacking this impassioned urgency, eventually made a more indelible im- pression by riding the poetry cowboy style so that the language worked its passage in its own way at its own speed. Though no one, however well disposed, could. pretend that this production for polish or smoothness was comparable to even the most ordinary Old Vic staging, it nevertheless gave a shape, a pace, a strength to Julius Calar which is all too rarely displayed.
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