The Englishness of English art ARTS
HILARY SPURLING
It was a happy thought to persuade Karolos Koun, familiar from the spectacular visits of his Greek Art Theatre, to direct Romeo and Juliet for the Royal Shakespeare Company as his first production outside Greece. Not that the play emerges refurbished with strange oriental tincts. On the contrary, the impres- sion is of a keen and idiosyncratic pleasure in things English, whether in the special virtues of the Stratford company, or in tFe quirks and practicalities of home life in Shakespeare's Verona.
There is something unmistakably English about these locals, round-shouldered and well wrapped in wool against a northern climate; or in the servants dashing past with last-minute baked meats for the Capulets' ball, and sub- merged in turn beneath the ball itself—the interlacing crimson patterns of the dancers forming a background to the rapturous solem- nity of the Pilgrim sonnet. The flowering of this climax from frantic preparations typifies Mr Koun's approach. The lovers' meeting, consum- mation, parting and death, punctuated by four grey dawns and frowning nights, are in- tricately dovetailed into the placid humdrum bustle of ordinary life. And the story at each twist is mirrored in the preoccupations of these homely bodies, each as self-absorbed and as im- portant in his own eyes as the two protagonists.
There is, for instance, the way in which Juliet's marriage to Paris is fatally precipitated by nothing more sinister than her father's passion for parties. Nicholas Selby's Capulet is capti- vated by the prospect of yet another feast: self- less devotion to his daughter shading imper- ceptibly into his enthusiasm for practical arrangements, for everything from supervising dates and quinces for the pastry to the hiring of twenty extra cooks. Disappointment accounts for his venomous attack on Juliet when, in his view, she. turns unreasonably peevish. And Juliet's terror, in the hideous visions of her long soliloquy before she takes the potion, is set against this image of her father, sitting up all night to 'play the housekeeper'; just as the grief and desolation next morning, on discovery of her body, are followed by a disconsolate band of fiddlers, turned away from the wedding party but determined 'to tarry the mourners and stay dinner.'
This is something which, from the Wars of the Roses onwards, the RSC have made pecu- liarly their own—this sense of lowering pas- sions, death or war, breaking on the comfortable tempo of a stable world. In this production it joins on to another area which this company has, so to speak, re-colonised: the delicate and fierce sophistication of sixteenth century society, those gay gentlemenvery good blades and very tall men—who appear in all the Comedies and here unite, under Mercutio, to twit and harass Romeo, and to make rude cracks at his expense.. Not least among the ser- vices we owe this company is their unobtrusive habit of taking the fig-leaves .off Shakespeare. The lewdness which runs through this play serves, in the expert hands of Norman Acidway as Mercutio, as a harsh, sardonic counterpoint to the lovers' scenes by moonlight and at sun- rise Their enchanted self-absorption is
heightened throughout by the comings and goings of their insouciant contemporaries, by a raging, red-faced Tybalt—Ian Hogg, brilliant in his spat with Capulet at the ball—and by John Bell's grave and subtle Paris, bringing limp white bridal flowers on Juliet's wedding morning. And Mercutio's sour, unnecessary death becomes a foretaste of the whole sorry muddle. of the three more futile deaths in the cold tomb before Capulet can join hands with Montague.
The sense of cross purposes broadening, before its closing comes too late, into an open trench between the generations, emerges par- ticularly strongly from this production. Partly, no doubt, because Estelle Kohler's babyish but hard-headed Juliet—Miss Kohler, perhaps wisely, makes no attempt at the radiance which the part demands—is good only in her sombre ageing after Tybalt's death, in the moment when she accepts rejection and betrayal by the adult world—by a treacherous father, a vicious and. even on this reading. unnecessarily brutal mother (Sheila Allen), and finally by her fond nurse. Elizabeth Spriggs plays the nurse and one is not likely to see two such performances in a lifetime. Delicious in distraction or in odd moments of complacency, Miss Spriggs reaches desperate depths in Friar Lawrence's cell: soothing a blubbering Romeo in her arms and listening to the friar in an ecstasy of thank- fulness—not so much for his learning, simply for his godlike gift, among the ruins of her whole known world, for stringing two consecu- tive thoughts together.
Absurd, though, to pretend that this Romeo could conceivably have turned to her for com- fort. Ian Holm still bears the marks of war, of mighty decisions powerfully taken, of mili- tary campaigns brilliantly fought as Richard or as Henry in this same theatre. Which perhaps explains why Mr Koun has chosen to let any sense of fire or dazzlement escape as best it may from the words, and instead to emphasise the unnatural violence of the central passion. There is grim foreboding from the start on both sides and precious little mutual attraction —Romeo, for instance, spending most of the balcony scene skulking beneath the jutting lip of a kind of tinpot dovecote (even the closet scene takes place out of doors on this same chilly dovecote—Timothy O'Brien's sets are at best uninspired, often clumsy and unsuitable, his grey concrete construction for street scenes looking extraordinarily like a bleak municipal convenience). At any rate, and in spite of many pleasing touches, Mr Holm has a weight and gravity which he cannot all at once discard: hard, watching him, to see why he should go so wretchedly to pieces all for one small girl and the comparatively minor setback of expulsion from Verona. Even such a ravishing, well- peopled and absorbing world as Mr Koun makes of this particular Verona.
Three more gems which in any other week would have shone brighter: Charles Wood's Fill the Stage with Happy Hours (at the Vaudeville out of the Royal Court) may be no great shakes on construction but paints a beguiling picture of seedy delights backstage, and has 'inspired a masterpiece from Sheila Hancock. .According to the Evidence, at the Savoy, is strangely witty for a thriller and con- tains a performance by Michael Gwynn that few will care to miss. And Lessing's Nathan the Wise, directed by Julius Gellner at • the Mermaid, has a stately lucidity and shapeliness which, I hope. may tempt other less enter- prising companies to explore the riches of eighteenth century German drama, if not of Lessing, then of his heir and pupil, Goe:he.
Previous page
