CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
‘, The Burning Bush." Adapted from the Hungarian by Noel Langley. (New Lindsey Theatre Club.) To be unpaid and involuntary members of the cast is an experience which befalls the modern audience with increasing frequency. In this play we found that we were all Hungarians, packed into a court- room in the eastern part of our putative motherland in the year 1938 ; we had come there, apparently, to witness the unfair trial of six Jews on a trumped-up charge of ritual murder. I am well aware that art knows no frontiers ; but the critic's duty is to decide how far this experiment with time and space justified itself, whether our Chestertonian journey to Hungary by way of Notting Hill was really necessary.
Undoubtedly, something is gained by employing the audience as a sort of Mulberry, an inert, prefabricated mass which, once it is in position, can be used by supporting troops to invade the dangerous mainland on the other side of the footlights. For one thing, it keeps the audience awake. In this play they are constantly being called to order by the judge, appealed to by the opposing counsel and even threatened—it is at least intended as a threat—with total expulsion from the building. We can moreover never be sure whether our neighbours are not crypto-personae dramatis, who may at any moment leap to their feet and discharge blank ammunition, or even blanker rhetoric, into the sordid judicial mêlée on the stage. For these reasons we remain in a state of mental alertness not really warranted by the intrinsic merits of this production.
For the sad thing about this trial scene in three acts is that it is dull. It lacks all subtlety and all suspense- it has the flat, squalid atmosphere, the indefinable air of having. L-en posed—much too late—for a purpose, which distinguishes all photographs of atrocities. We see the machinery—Mark I, by contemporary standards—of intimidation and falsification and racial prejudice at work. But we are not convinced or moved by it ; only perhaps, because it is so crudely done, a little disgusted. It would not matter the characters being so sharply divided into black and white if the conflicts between them were not grey—grey with anti-climax, grey with too much verbiage, grey with minor improbabilities. The large cast attack their unpromising material with more vigour than skill, and the whole production, though, staged cleverly in a confined space, cannot
be rated among the New Lindsey's successes. PETER FLEMING.
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