23 MAY 1970, Page 20

THEATRE

Visitors in the land of Ying

HILARY SPURLING

`Pu-lai-tun is a place famous for its beauty. It is in Europe, on the coast of the land of Ying. It lies about 160 leagues south of Lust- tun and can be reached by coach in two hours . . . Here . . . is a bridge, set upon wooden piers, that goes out several thousand feet into the sea, so built that wanderers, climbing to a height, may lean and gaze afar; and at the end of the bridge there is a music- room.'

So wrote the Chinaman, Li Shu-ch'ang (translated by Arthur Waley) in 1877, des- cribing the spectacle which had impressed him most in the mysterious West, namely the pleasure domes of Brighton. The same oriental magic was at work in Brighton once again last week, only this time in reverse, when the festival ended with the second visit to this country of the Noh Theatre of Tokyo. The company came first three years ago, in Peter Daubeny's World Theatre Season, and seemed, each time, as outlandish and as ravishing as the music-room on Brighton pier by night once seemed to Li Shu-ch'ang: 'The music, played above the waters, is caught up and cast back by wind and tide, faltering in wafts of dim, mysterious sound, as though it floated from another world.'

The music of shrill flute and drum floated from another world last week as these actors, moving gravely in stiff papery costumes on slippered feet across the sacred stage, per- formed their ancient plays against the homely gilded plaster of the Dome. What is odd is that the plays, delivered in archaic Japanese by voices which rise and fall in strange, sharp arabesques as though to a score by Boulez, convey to one's eyes and ears images already

perfectly &Millar from Arthur Waleyis Eng-

— _ Noh Theatre at Brighton

Catania Stabile Theatre at the Aldwych Peer Gynt (Chichester) Find Your Way Home (Open Space)

lish

lish versions of Noh texts. The first play cele- brates a distant reign of peace and wisdom: the Emperor sends an attendant to catch a heron in the palace garden; the heron takes flight but obligingly returns on learning that his presence is required by imperial com- mand; the Emperor, well pleased, confers court rank of the fifth grade on both heron and attendant, whereupon the heron thanks him with a dance.

Umewaka Manzaburo played the heron: and anyone who remembers the angel's ex- quisite dance, performed by this great actor in 1967, will readily imagine the grace and strength and delicacy of this one: Mr Ume- waka scarcely moves, save for a faint hunch- ing in his robes, one leg occasionally drawn up, light tapping steps describing once or twice a rapid circle. At the end—and it is for moments such as this, which catches the bird's flight like a fine brush stroke on paper, that the Noh is unforgettable—with a single, swift slither of wrist and hand and sleeve, the heron flies away. The fact that it is an old man who then gets up and leaves the stage is immaterial, as are the attendants who wait with the musicians—seated on the ground before the painted pine tree at the back of an otherwise bare stage—to _ smooth an actor's ruffled skirt or fetch, arrange and take away his props.

The company also brought The Lady Aol,

a sombre tragedy of jealousy expressed in images—the Lady Rokujo darting like a knife-blade at her victim or flinching back, one hand raised in shame or venom to her fierce, pale, porcelain mask—which remain indelibly from their last visit; and a Kyogen play about a peasant stealing melons. One will not soon forget the gaiety of this thief (played by Shigeyama Sengoro, who must be among the funniest men alive) when, bowling over and over in the melon field, he lands full-length and lies chortling on a melon; or his tirade of curses as he tugs, in consummately graceful, apoplectic fury, at invisible vine-stems rooted stubbornly in imaginary soil.

Li Shu-ch'ang, who admired Victorian England's industrial and economic strength, still thought that 'by the possession of a Pu-lai-tun a country's might may well be judged'; and anyone who saw the Noh in Pu-lai-tun Dome last week may well return the compliment, and marvel at a country which possesses a theatre of such subtle beauty, passion and fantastic grace.

Meanwhile, Mr Daubeny brought another visitor to the land of Ying on Monday, the Catania Stabile Theatre from Sicily in Pirandello's early play, Lb/a. The company was founded in Catania twelve years ago, specialises in plays by Sicilian authors (Piran- dello wrote this one in Sicilian on a visit to his native island in 1916) and has already built up a large and varied popular audience, touring Palermo, Messina and Syracuse each year, as well as the Italian mainland. Liola is the production which has had the longest run to date, and it is not hard to see why : the play has a charming energy and wit, besides the peculiar fascination exerted by an early work—comparatively modest, derivative, and suggesting only faintly as yet Pirandello's incomparable flavour—from one of at most three or four indisputably great playwrights of the twentieth century.

Set in the Sicilian countryside at almond and grape harvest, turning on greed, jealousy, revenge among village girls en- joying what the programme aptly calls- a 'climate of panic sensuality', the play fol- lows Pirandello's countryman and master, Verga. It manipulates what must be stock Italian themes, and in particular bears a strong likeness to Machiavelli's Mandragola which we saw last month in the same season : Pirandello, like Machiavelli, turns a sardonic eye on contemporary low life, tweaking it this way and that into an agreeably grotesque and foolish tangle, as much for his own amusement as to gratify his audience. Hard to say which plot is twistier, but both re- volve around identical components: in each case, an ageing frustrate pantaloon (enchant- ing performance by Umberto Spadaro as the heavy Sicilian husband) married to a young and lovely bride goes to absurd lengths to secure an heir, and is in each case soundly diddled by the lady's young and lusty lover ('Turi Ferro, who directs the production and plays the hero with superlative panache). The whole ludicrous embroglio is acted out, in both plays, before quantities of _neigh- bours, poking and prying with a gimlet eye.

But Machiavelli's firm lines, his pleasure in characters jerking frantically along fixed grooves, have loosened in Pirandello to some- thing dreamier and altogether more in- tangible. Indeed already, beneath Liola's sunny surface, one may detect traces—in the play's heady, voluptuous atmosphere, in the way it hovers momentarily on the brink of blood and pain, in the vendetta so humorously pursued by Liola himself and the bitter, white face of his victim as the cur- tain falls—of the preoccupations of Piran- dello's late and greatest plays. Impotence, jealousy, desire, revenge are after all his perennial themes; cuckold, treacherous wife and self-admiring lover are the protagonists as much of Rules of the Game as of Liola; oen the neighbours in this comedy may be taken as forerunners of those watchers— infinitely more cruel and brutally urbane— whose malevolence gives a vicious edge to so many of his plays, and above all to Henry III. It is precisely this latent savagery that English productions, assuming (which is the last thing it is safe to do with Pirandello) that his characters mean what they say, al- most invariably miss; so that, if this produc- tion provides an inkling of the ferocity, the barbaric Sicilian passion, which lurks be- neath the cold, smooth, glittering surfaces of his later plays, then the Catania company's kit will have been as salutory as it has been pleasant.

But, turning from our visitors to a more familiar prospect, productions native to the land of Ying last week were less than happy: Peter Coe's production of Peer Gynt—drab to look at and to listen to, trolls in pink piggy masks, the bulk of the play reduced to in- fantile daydreams and set, appropriately enough, in the Gynts' ancestral nursery—is a signal disservice to Ibsen, and for that matter to Christopher Fry who made the excellent translation; Roy Dotrice contri- butes a gay and gallant Peer. John Hopkins's Find Your Way Home belongs to that de- pressing genre—a genre which, I fear, like children's shoes still has far to go—which takes a stock adulterous triangle and examines it in the tritest possible terms, only with what used to be the lady vamp trans- formed into a queer.