Private lives
Peter Jenkins
Outside Edge (Queens) Private Life of the Third Reich (Open Space) Love's Labour's Lost (RSC, Aldwych) One powerful image can go a long way in an evening at the theatre. In Outside Edge the lights come up on a cricket pavillion so perfectly designed by Grant Hicks that you can imagine at once the smell of linseed oil and sweaty boxes. We were somewhere in suburban Middlesex I guessed and was reminded of hearing Ian Smith on the radio that weekend saying how green and welcoming Twickenham looked after all those years as he came flying into London. Here was a male world inhabited by long • suffering and dissatisfied women. One knew exactly what Miriam's cricket tea was going to look and taste like and one knew exactly what her married life with Bob was like when she says, lips tight and elaborately calm, 'Please don't tell me to chop chop.' Bob, the captain of the side, a man of down-at-heel officer-like qualities, is dressed in an airtex shirt, army-style shorts and sandals. He is as unsexy as an Englishman can get.
Sex, drink, marriage and cricket are the themes of Richard Harris's play. I wish I had seen it originally at Hampstead because I suspect it would have seemed much bigger there than it does now at the Queens. It is enjoyable enough, good grubby English fun, but the slightness shows through as is usually the case when sit, corn. takes to the stage. Gradually the expectancy created by the sights and smells of the pavillion wears off, so does the novelty of sheer character, and we are left asking ourselves, why — why this little world? Harris can write snappy one-liners and his characters are sharply drawn, especially Maggie, a common, gangling sexpot. Maureen Lipman has her down to the last vowel sound. Julia McKenzie is cruelly accurate as Miriam who knows that a woman's place is in the pavillion. John Kane is exactly the type as the captain. The play has a winning friendliness about it and will please those who are easily pleased. An ideal evening out for the cricket club. The same could not be said for Private Life of the Third Reich. I was interested to see it being done — for the first time in a professional production, as far as is known because it is a Brechtian rarity, a regression into the naturalistic theatre at the time of his exile in Vienna (it was written 1935-8) and his only work, I think, to be produced in the United States during his subsequent exile there. Most of its insights into ordinary life under Nazism seem banal today and also to apply equally to the Soviet version of totalitarianism which Brecht condoned to the end.
The 'play' consists of 16 vignettes and I am afraid I found myself counting them rather like days until the end of term. The technique required is essentially that of the short story writer. In such a restricted form dramatic intensity is essential. In a few of them Brecht achieves it, mostly he doesn't. The best skit is the one called Chalk Cross. It takes place below stairs in the home of a party functionary and we see how corrosive suspicion breeds even in the relaxed intimacy of the kitchen as a young girl is brought to fear that she might even be denounced by her SA fiancé. In another along the same lines we see a husband and wife driven to paranoid distraction as they convince themselves that their teenage son has gone on a Sunday afternoon to denounce them to the Hitler Youth. He is out buying sweets. by mme oetveeniinngvewnotiuvled have be e been tw helped ass but et dn needed ds oamdrearye ki kind soeft doefvshabbyi ee t6 carry do or along: Brecht himself had the idea of doingci taar as ae carrier rolling o f f through s wf raormt i ma eN Nazi Europe. One young actor, Dickin Ashworth, caught my eye.
I was not invited to The Case of the Oily Levantine and having read the notices decided not to bother and went instead to the Aldwych to see again John Barton's Production of Love's Labour's Lost which I had enjoyed so much in Stratford last year. It really shouldn't be missed. Here is Shakespeare beautiful to look at, beautiful to listen to and made genuinely funny. It is Ideal for children who like Shakespeare and dn enchanting introduction for those who think they don't.
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