• ARTS • LETTERS • MONEY• LEISURE THEATRE

No knack of the knock

KENNETH HURREN

It is a depressing comment on the low view taken by managers of Londoners' theatregoing tastes vis-a-vis those of New Yorkers that The Dirtiest Show in Town, produced off-Broadway by La Mama workshop (which I take to be some fly- blown bistro on the wrong side of town), has been brought into London not to some similarly seedy cellar but to an hitherto reputable West End theatre. The grubby import turned up at the Duchess last week —or, rather, the week before, since there were several preview, or prevoyeur, per- formances prior to the official 'first' night when it was exposed to the local critics, an event of which the management may have felt some reason to be apprehensive.

In fact, the reviews the show got in the daily prints were remarkably gener- ous. They were not, to be sure, aglow with approbation: applied to an exhibit con- cerned with a subject other than sex, they would have been considered annihilating and the hapless investors would have cut their losses and closed on Saturday. On the second night at the Duchess, though, the 'House Full' boards were out, and they were fairly accurate, too (at least, they were at the start of the proceedings), which is an indication either that my col- leagues had been over-tolerant or. more probably, that there is a communication gap between the reviewers and those readers who could be counted as potential patrons of a show holding out the promise of indescribable obscenities.

The mere use of the word 'obscene' is, of course, almost an encouragement to book immediately, and reviewers tend to recoil from it anyway, lest they be categor- ised with censorial elements eager to have the thing closed by the police. By the same token anyone who might dub the show 'offensive' will inevitably be regarded as over-delicate in his sensibilities; and once the word is out that there is a certain amount of nudity on the stage, the other- wise damning adjective 'boring' will sim- ply not be believed. Clearly some special vocabulary'is required.

I doubt whether I have the knack of the effective knock in these cases, and I

shall content myself with correcting one particular impression that may have got about, which is that the show has some- thing in common with the trendy young. l'm sure it has none. The Dirtiest Show

has certainly come along posing preten- tiously as 'a documentary of the destruc- tive effects of air, water and mind pollu- tion in New York City,' but, while the exhibit itself unquestionably contributes to the pollution of any city in which it happens to appear, it is documentarily concerned with nothing so important. Its ecological references are minimal, and peripheral at best. There is here no bold statement from a liberated generation; only drivelling inanities. There is nothing progressive or experimental or avant- garde. The primary intention is to work up to a point at which the performers can get their clothes off and get gracelessly into sexual action.

This can hold little attraction for the youth of these permissive times They may sometimes seem to be acquiescent in the idea that sex should take the place of entertainment, but I doubt whether they're as keen on the idea of entertainment taking the place of sex. They have doubt- less pondered the theory advanced by defenders of professional boxing, that the sight of paid pugs belting each other in the ring purges the spectator of his own bel- ligerent instincts: the application of the same reasoning to sex as a spectator sport leads, of course, to a conclusion hard to contemplate without dismay. It would thus have given me quite a turn if I'd seen any youthful chaps at the Duchess. For them, I hope. a bird in the hand is worth two (or any number, come to that) on a stage: those who can, do: only those

who can't, view. The Dirtiest Show in Town is a show less for the 'seventies than for the over-seventies, but for only a sad minority even of them: for it is bereft of talent as well as taste. Indeed, anyone

thinking of going just for the nudity—per-

haps feeling the old Kraft ebbing and keen to consider, any possible restorative—

needs to be warned that it is preceded by very nearly an hour of stupefying witless- ness from which he will probably take refuge in sleep, if it does not actually send him stamping testily from the theatre.

But my objections to this sort of thing are much like • my objections to capital punishment, which is to say that they arc

prompted by pity less for the culpable victims (in the one case, murderers who die, and in the other, audiences who are bludgeoned into boredom) than for those who are hired to carry out the punish- ment, the executioner and the executants, and are degraded again and again by these professional duties until finally, pitiably, they are unaware of the extent of their degradation.

The Mermaid, on which London has come to rely for most of its Shaw revivals, has done nothing better in this line than its current rediscovery of the comedy. John Bull's Other Island, whose long neglect can be laid, perhaps, to an assumption that a play written in 1904 about Anglo- Irish affairs could have little pertinence in a spectacularly changed situation. The assumption is reasonable but wrong. Shaw himself conceded that his crystal ball had been more than usually fallible in the matter of political developments, but in other respects the piece retains an almost painful relevance. The great ex- patriate never looked at his fellow-coun- trymen more acutely, nor caricatured English attitudes more wittily than here: and the vital characters are affectionately played in this revival by Christopher Benjamin, engagingly absurd as the Eng- lish butt of the humour, and Edward Pctherbridge as the principal Irishman.