21 FEBRUARY 1969, Page 21

11' or Monologues in Front of Burning Cities (Old Vic)

THEATRE

Wood if he could

HILARY SPURLING

11' or Monologues in Front of Burning Cities (Old Vic) The Boys in the Band (Wyndham's) Charles Wood's at the National Theatre is magnificent to look at: stylised palm fronds twirl across the stage against curtains extrava- gantly looped and swagged; there are cut-outs, drop-cloths, scrolls and mottoes, a vast wooden horse, painted flats and cardboard cannon; misty pastel landscapes on the back- drop or ravaged palaces dripping blood; the smoky tableau of a battle is lit at one point by green and scarlet flares, at another three transparent gauzes fly down to the chirruping of birds for a radiant transformation scene. There is even a miniature proscenium stage, complete from Pollock's toyshop, and a row of tin floats inserted on the boards of the Old Vic proper; the sets are designed by Michael Annals and lilt by Leonard Tucker, with properly mellifluous, grim or rousing music composed by Tristram Carey.

The play's subject is ostensibly the Indian mutiny, and in particular General Havelock's march to the relief of Cawnpore and Lucknow. But the chief impression is of extreme pleasure in the spectacular trappings of the mid-Vic- torian stage. It is as though Mr Wood's twin themes, in Fill the Stage with Happy Hours (trouble backstage in the provinces) and Dingo (on the horrors of the Second World War), had been joined and both moved back almost a century. So that what emerges in the end from 'H' is a conflict, apparently unresolved in the author's mind, between his keen delight in the theatrical conventions of the period, and what may or may not be disgust at the atrocities perpetrated on both sides in the struggle for Cawnpore. This latter attitude, in so far as it is discernible at all, is further complicated by Mr Wood's affection for things military: the equipment, insignia, correct address and linguistic eccentricities of his Vic- torian soldiery are all rendered with the fond, meticulous pride of a regimental history. And the whole uneasy mixture is, in any case, irretrievably confused by Geoffrey Reeves's extraordinary production.

For the director of such a rambling and enig- matic text, Mr Reeves has singularly little sense of form. Moreover, his repertoire of moves is sadly limited. He has, for one thing, evolved only one stock method of conveying an army on and off stage which, since the bulk of the play consists of precisely this manoeuvre, makes for considerable tedium. For another, it does not seem to have occurred to him that these grandiose settings require something rather bolder than contemporary, naturalistic styles of acting: scenes of slaughter, comedy and violent exhortation all take place in the same atmosphere of polite and unemphatic muddle. Small dusty battles are fought out from time to time on the inner stage; occa-

&tastily breakfast is taken, or what may per- haps—judging by the copious literature in the programme—have been a rape attempted; but the point, indeed as often as not the simple content, of these episodes remains obscure. Frequent inconsistencies—The Well at Cawn- pore,' for example, which has its own drop-cur- tain but is nowhere mentioned in the text— hint at fairly reckless work in the cutting room.

But, if the direction is deplorable and the text hard to fathom, the evening, as always with this company, still has its pleasures— notably Robert Lang's unctuous, cold and creamy Havelock; Gerald James's imperturb- ably comical Welsh captain; an elated and infinitely sinister, half-Irish sepoy by Terence Taplin; and Frank Wylie, giving a performance of extraordinary delicacy and power as Surgeon-Major Sooter, a latter-day Thersites with more than a touch of Doctor Astrov.

Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band also takes you back, though not quite as far as 'H.' 'The play is by far the frankest treatment of homosexuality [the New York Times has] ever seen.' It is also part of a logical develop- ment whereby, in America at any rate, con- temporary playwrights are busy rewriting what Kenneth Tynan once called 'the Loamshire play' (sometimes, it will be recalled, 'as a heroic tribute to realism,' set in Berkshire). This genre was not so long ago much ridiculed, and ultimately banished from our stage, for its cloying smugness, its artificiality and its polite, not to say furtive, treatment of emotion. But anyone who still regrets that passing will find its hallmarks all lovingly preserved in this new, transatlantic school; the chief difference being

that, instead -of pretending, as so many did for so long, that some of the men were ladies, now they are all men.

John Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes was a prime example of this new, and frankly sear- ing, kind of thing. Mr Herbert's situation, characters and dialogue—all of which might have come straight from the dorm scenes in a girls' school story—were made thoroughly respectable by the simple but ingenious ruse of transferring them to four male homosexuals sharing a prison cell. By the same token, and for all its nifty New York slang, Mr Crowley's play could scarcely be more English : here are all the ancient, well-loved thrills, the fraught silences, the strangled sobs, the terse confes- sions—distraught ('Halik, I love you') or defiant ('Because I do love him. And I don't care who knows it!')—and even that vibrant, clipped delivery reserved especially for the final showdown: 'You ended the friendship, Alan, because you couldn't face the truth.' As one by one Mr Crowley's characters take their turn at 'facing the truth,' one recognises a familiar complacency implicit in the invitation to watch these soi-disant freaks unpack their troubles.

None the less, Mr Crowley's humorous top- dressing has an engaging breeziness and the cast, imported once again wholesale from Broadway and admirably directed by Robert Moore, perform prodigies of tact on the frankly boring sections: Robert La Tourneaux, in particular, as the husky, pouting, Texan tart, Tom Aldredge as his delectable camp follower, and Leonard Frey's grotesque and stately Harold should not be missed. The text is pub- lished by Seeker and Warburg at 30s.