T hea tre
Malaria Dream
By ALAN BRIEN Ross. (Theatre Royal, Haymarket.) OUR first sight of T. E. Lawrence in Terence Rattigan's 'dramatic por- trait' is when he is marched into the adju- tant's office, in his post- war disguise as Aircraft- man J. H. Ross of the C 3 Royal Air Force, to face a charge of being absent without leave for fifteen minutes. From that moment to the end, the play belongs to Ross/Lawrence/Guinness—the last mask seeming to be as much a part of the man as the other two. Too much has been made in the past by critics (including me) of Alec Guin- ness's facelessness. It is true that to watch him in his dressing-room (as I did once during the run of Hotel Paradiso), removing his make-up and carefully placing his wig, his eyebrows, and his moustache one by one on the head of a cloth dummy, is to be audience at what seems a sinis- terly underplayed conjuring trick. There is one expressive head without a body—and there is another body with only the outline of a head. But once the cream has been wiped across the skin, a strong, individual, memorable face grad- ually appears like a photograph in a developing tray. What is revealed is Easter Island rather than Easter egg. Guinness's nose has more finely drawn French elegance than Lawrence's Anglo- Saxon blob and his darker eyes protrude under froggier hoods than Lawrence's light, deepset boy-scout stare. But both have that champing jaw which curves like a clergyman's collar, the long camel runnel beneath the nostrils, and the thin, ironic, scimitar lips. In a play like this it is sheer academic pedantry to insist that the audience should attempt to dissociate the histori- cal Lawrence from Mr. Rattigan's impressionist sketch. The remarkable resemblance of Guinness to Lawrence is part of the impact of the words and situations and players on the stage—and that resemblance accelerates the terminal velocity of Ross's punch.
As the Lawrence of 1922, Guinness gives him- self the coarsely, handsomely tough face of a professional footballer; like the carelessly-baked, porous-brick copy of some fine china original. His body is short and squat and underslung with a low centre of gravity in the seat of his pants. He is a man who has retracted his soul the way a tortoise retracts its head—only the clumsy, ugly uniform is allowed to be touched in this world of jovial room-mates, sharp-eyed sergeants and pip-squeak officers. But even this shell is sensitive and Guinness brilliantly conveys the shivers of the shy man nudged on a bruise.
The main section of the play takes place in a flashback to Arabia recalled in a malaria dream. Here is Lawrence in his late twenties—several pounds, and skins, thinner. This is Guinness in his Herbert Pocket mood, gayly sportive and un- calloused by experience, showing off like a bright child who never knows when to stop. Death and boredom and exhaustion and danger and admira- tion give him that leathery resilience of a Napoleon or a Qesar. He can still bend without breaking. The opening of the second act sees Lawrence at the height of his powers when he meets General Allenby and accepts the official direction of his desert war. Guinness's control of his technique at this moment is so masterly as to be almost insulting—his cocky walk, his sub- merged giggles, his metallic repartee, his offhand charm is adopted half to win over the brass-hat and half to entrance us. The dramatic crisis of the play comes when Lawrence is captured by the shrewd epicene Turkish Governor and flogged, fingered and bloodied into admitting to himself his own horrible pleasure in being man- handled. ('I remembered smiling idly at him, for a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was welling through me,' wrote Lawrence, 'and then he flung up his arm and hacked me with the full length of his whip into my groin.') Guinness afterwards, in a daring stroke, drags himself off stage left with an almost ludicrous foot-trailing undulation like a slow-motion sand dance which is superbly, unbearably, improbably convincing.
There are many other aspects of Guinness's performance which I would like to have described —the way, for instance, he conveys the sensation of a man anmsthetised by slaughter not by sinking into a trance but by thawing painfully out of one. Throughout the play, to the discomfiture of those critics who prefer to discover performances which do not exist rather than to evaluate those which do, Guinness plays like a highly conscious vir- tuoso. But to concentrate on the acting suggests that the play itself is simply transparent, raw material. This is not so—Mr. Rattigan, if any- thing, has always dressed and cooked and stuffed and sauced his material too elaborately. Ross is engrossing drama.
To object that each climax always erupts at the inevitable point, that every joke releases a moment of tension and slackens the thread for the next sharp tug, that scene after scene turns the hero through a different angle of vision, that the entire play has been painstakingly carpen- tered, caulked and painted before being launched —this is to fall into the heresy of The Superiority of the Unmade Play. There are still some drama- tists who do not need Joan Littlewood. It is also to confuse hindsight with insight. Now we can all see that these tureads were obvious links in the Lawrence story, but would we have found them ourselves in the enormous tangled cocoon of the Lawrence myth?
do not myself believe that the I urkish Gov- ernor of Deraa was Machiavellian enough to have plotted the r..pe of Lawrence as a way of debauching his will (Lawrence's own account can just possibly bear tnis interpretation), but drama- tically it makes a horrendous centre to the web of his strange, camouflaged life. And in stage terms, it imposes a convincing pattern on what otherwise would have been simply sequence of exciting and intriguing events. Sometimes Mr. Rattigan does cheat. 1 do not complain of the bodyguard who will not speak to the infidel Englishman so that Mr. Rattigaa can build up anticipation of the moment of general triumph symbolised by this small human victory. But it is sheer trickery to avoid allowing the bodyguard to speak to his Moslem companions too, simply for the sake of the eventual contrast. But such legerdemain is far outbalanced by innumerable genuine displays of craftsmanship which are felt without being noticed—such as the short speech in which the slimy fellow-aircraftman who un- masks him describes how he once saw Lawrence in Paris backing 'ever so shyly' into the limelight.
Ross could have been a greater play (which play couldn't—except for Antony and Cleo- patra?), but only by being a different play. Unless the real Lawrence was abandoned altogether, 1 do not see how his life could be staged with less fiction and more integrity Ideally, I would have liked to see Mr. Rattigan take the essence of Lawrence and then begin to work outwards, ignoring facts and relying on his own imaginative identification with the'Spirit of the man. But I find it hard enough to review plays—Mr. Ratti- gan must be allowed to write his own.
Much of the surface gloss on Ross. which has provoked some critics by being impervious to their pickaxes, seems to have been added by the director, Glen Byam. Shaw. Though continually intelligent and sympathetic to the play. Mr. Shaw has perhaps too heavily underlined several inci- dents and certainly overproduced the early ser- vice comedy. But on the whole he has created a wonderfully accurate period atmosphere (though he should not allow his author to confuse the CB and the CBE) with all the unknown faces looking as if they had been borrowed from old newspapers and all the famous ones seeming to be reincarnations. Harry Andrews as Allenby and Anthony Nicholls as Storrs were marvellously skin-tight and lifelike without ever seeming im- personations. Geoffrey Keen, as the terrible Turk, for once was allowed,to cease being the decent type he usually plays—and what a .telling stroke of production to allow that pot belly to shine so grossly! Mark Dignam had an almost impossible role: how to play the hammy Auda Abu Tayi without seeming like a demon king in burnt cork? Altogether the best-acted, best-written play in London.
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