THEATRE
Idiotic Joyg
The Idiot; Grandma, Uncle Iliko, Hilarion and I. (Leningrad Gorki Theatre at the Aldwych.)— Happy Family. (Hampstead Theatre Club.)
IHE first visit of the Leningrad Gorki Theatre to London is an impressive occasion. If it hasn't quite the luminous aura of those first post-war visits of the Moscow Arts, it is probably because our own theatre has made such strides in the meantime—but what a pleasure it is to watch these Russian actors go into action, swarming out from the wings to cover the stage, like paint washing on to a canvas.
The company has brought -two productions, both made-over novels, chosen perhaps to present a contrast in styles. Solidly furnished drawing- rooms and studies glide by for The Idiot (they glided irreproachably on the second night if not on The first), against grey velvet hangings and ominous link-music: a borrowing from the plushy days of the cinema, discreetly assimilated to the stage and admirably suited to Dostoievsky's own romantic grandeur. The production is in its tenth year. Grandma, in her third year, is deter- minedly contemporary. With stylised green fields on the drop-curtain (`nv khollective farm,' explains the hero why a_grin) and sets designed to look like childish scribblings in three dimen- sions, Grandma has a meanness and faux-naif dowdiness about the decor which correspond no doubt equally well to qualities in the original text.
So far as the actors are concerned, the difference is skin-deep only. Take the two rail- way scenes, prime examples of the Russian art-
the one in The Idiot sketched in with a slight swaying and an occasional lurch from the travellers as the train chugs towards Petersburg, the other in Grandma a hilarious affair of bodies jammed in a narrow doorway, packed tight, flaring with irritation in the prickly heat and as suddenly subsiding over food and drink brought out from nowhere. There is nothing better in this tale of a country boy and his heart of gold. which has a flavour of saccharine too powerful even for the innate irony of these actors.
They flourish, however, and put forth gigantic blooms on the rich soil of Dostoievsky. Innolienti Smoktunovsky gives us necessarily a fore- shortened Mishkin, endowed when we first see him with qualities of renunciation and sickness thrown forward from later parts of the novel. His voice is spent and reedy, his body motionless, conserving its forces. When Rogozhin offers to shake hands a hand creeps limply out of Mish- kin's cloak, with a faint, answering gleam from his eyes, like round wet pebbles let into a lace stubbly and blotched with cold. There are traces of the Prince's gaiety in his first meeting with Mme Yepanchin and her daughters, but not for long. He detaChes a hair painstakingly from a sheet of note-paper, finds a conch shell on the General's desk and clamps it to his ear, as though self-forgetfulness were an obsessive respite. When he crosses the stage with his high-shouldered, difficult walk one wishes it were twice Otattn times as wide.
The first half of the play keeps closely to Pail One of the novel (the second extracting its 'Main strand only from the rest), but the clisbax 'of Nastasya Filipovna's birthday party is not so much a revelation and a turning point for this Mishkin. as a confirmation of his doom. The
innokenti Sinoktunovsky
scene itself is a breathtaking piece of work (director and adaptor, masterly on both counts, is G. A. Tovstonogov). No one who heard them can surely forget the noises made by a roomful of Russians in hysterics preparing to burn ten thousand roubles in the grate—Mishkin weeping quietly at the table, Nastasya, chin up and bosom heaving, daring Ganya to pluck the roubles out, Rogozhin watching her in ecstacy, one or two respectable gentlemen turning quite white with shock, Lebedev beside himself, knocking his head on the ground in despair as the notes begin to catch, the chorus of guests behind him yearn- ing towards the fireplace with arms outflung, the whole roomful parting like the Red Sea as Ganya begins his dreadful sleep-walking towards the fire, turns as he reaches it and crashes to the floor in a dead faint.
Oleg Borisov as Ganya makes the most of this spectacular triumph of vanity over greed. Nikolai Trofimov's Lebedev is outstanding, Tatyana Donna's Nastasya on the whole too placid to rise much off the ground. The core of the play is the gradual reversal of roles between Ali#1Fin and Yevgeni Lebedev's Rogozhin, fevEriSh from the start, growing sterner and more gloomy as he takes to slinking through the shadows with a knife, finally as docile as a child in their last long scene together, beside the great red curtained bed on which Nastasya's body lies.
So the Russians amaze us with their acting not their plays, understandably enough since we know the dangers which attend the writer in their country. But, if Grandma is an escape into a baby world, we have our own tradition of let's pretend from Lewis Carroll through A. A. Milne to Giles Cootier, whose latest play opened last week at Hampstead. It is a fable of retarded development, two sisters and a stockbroking brother, all com- fortIghly off and still immersed in squabbles over the meccano. Mr Cooper has a sharp eye for cruelty and weakness, and a profound reluctance to phtsue his ,conclusions. If his characters' vio- lence- is unreal so is their childishness, and the bettg, the actors the more they show him up. Comeare the revelation that Father Christmas is a figment, supposedly shattering in its effect, with the genuine emotions revealed when the brother puts fantasy aside and cross-examines his sister's suitor,in his capacity as businessman. But mostly this., is an adult's eye view of the nursery, cushismed by whimsy from the real barbarity whit exists in such people at whatever age. Mr Cooper pulls the woof over his own eyes and plunges us in tedium.
HILARY SPURLING
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