Theatre
Round House chic
Kenneth Hurren
The 1k by Denis Cannan and Cohn Higgins, from the book The Mountain People by Colin Turnbull (Round House, Chalk Farm) Judgement by Barry Collins (Royal Court) Plunder by Ben Travers; National Theatre Company (Old Vic) In his production of The 1k, an anthropological documentaey about a Ugandan tribe starving to extinction, Peter Brook takes an oddly selective view of realism. There is no question of the actors actually impersonating the Ik people (which wouldn't be easy, since the company is a mixed bunch, varying from Jewish to Japanese), but when they wolf handfuls of food which is too much for their shrivelled, empty stomachs and are sick, the vomiting is real enough, or at least has remarkable verisimilitude. If Brook seems not too concerned to give us the Ik, he does not spare us the yuk.
It's not an easy life for the actors at the International Centre of Theatre Research, which is Brook's place in Paris where he and his disciples devote themselves to exploring new dimensions and pushing back frontiers of drama, surfacing only occasionally for a tour around Africa (a new and unscheduled peril to afflict emergent nations) or a performance in Persia or the Sahara or, this time, at the Round House under the aegis of the Royal Shakespeare Company, of which Brook remains a director and presumably has a voice in where their subsidy goes. The actors, as I was saying, have it rough. Ten minutes before the play began people were out there scattering rocks about and sweeping the stage. These turned out to be the players, who also find themselves lumbered with other scene-shifting and building chores.
Actually it wasn't ten minutes before the play began; it was ten minutes before it was scheduled to begin — at least on the first night. Ten minutes after it was scheduled to begin, the dashingly trendy congregation (including the head man of the London branch of the RSC, who plainly knew a thing or two about schedules) were still filing in, with many a gay wave yon and hither to friends across the open stage. It later transpired, somewhat indecently, that these beautiful people — with their nice clothes and their hair transplants and their plump and rosy ten-thousand-a-year faces registering strange expressions that mingled concern and complacency and blank boredom — were going to have to look at each other throughout the performance, since one of Brook's notions is to keep the house-lights blazing. Disconcerting touch, that. I think it may be to discourage the restive from leaving (the play has no interval), but I may be wrong. It could be that he wants that contrast between the chic background and the stage portrayal of the distressed tribespeople, and wants his affluently liberal admirers to feel guilty and degraded in watching the hapless Ik and doing nothing about them — unlike the ICTR which is rather archly making an entertainment of their plight.
No, I shouldn't have mentioned 'entertainment'. It's not a word that figures prominently in the ICTR scheme of things. They go in for • such stuff as, "The act of entering a theatre building carries with it a whole structure of associations and practices which largely shapes the experience that eventually takes place." I think it must have been my structure of associations and practices that wasn't quite up to The Ik. When actors make a big thing out of putting up shacks and brewing up tea, it seems to me no more interesting than labourers digging a hole in the road; and when I see a play with no propelling continuity, and the scenes of which could be played more or less in any order, I think too much about structure for the good of what I'm watching.
What 'associations and practices' the scriptwriters had in mind is hard to say. Their approach, which I have seen described as 'cool' and 'objective' and 'unemotionally factual', is detached to the point of seeming to see the Ik almost from another planet. The predicament of these unfortunate people is ostensibly pitiable. Deprived of the hunting by which they lived — because of the concern of the more• civilised world to preserve the wild life of their territory — they were slow to acquire the knack of agricultural farming. Nor do they seem to have been especially keen to do so, possibly because the constant droughts to which the region is subject kept undermining their efforts, and just began starving to death. Eighteen years after the no-hunting edict Colin Turnbull, an English anthropologist, went out to see how they were faring, and the play — in which Turnbull is seen noting the details of their desperation and their abandonment of all moral insticts and impulses as they steal and scavenge for food — is adapted from the book he wrote about them.
Its failure as a theatrical experience is that it neither involves nor properly informs. It provides no answers because it asks no questions. You won't discover from it whether any government or governments have been moved to come to the aid of the lk; whether there is, or was, any properly organised programme for their resettlement; or why they appear to have so small an interest in self-preservation and were reluctant to move to the Sudan or elsewhere. From this account, the lk are lemming-like, a tribe intent on going down the drain.
This isn't necessarily true. In the programme book, along with chunks of Brook's philosophy and an opaque account of the work of the ICTR, there is a piece by Denis Canna'', one of the adapters, throwing doubt on the relevance and veracity of the whole thing on the grounds that "Turnbull conceived a theory and then looked for the facts to fit it," and the play itself demonstrates how easily he could have been deceived. Seeing a fire in the distance, he asks what it is. One of the Ik (the Japanese one, cute
as buttons) tells him a man is being burned to death for committing adultery. Turnbull, stoically, begins writing it down. "Ees not true," says the Ik, grinning impishly, and rilD one can guess whether they always corrected such jokey little deceptions.
It would be a mistake to think, by the way, that the play is, with all its aimlessness, fun. I'm sorry to say it isn't. It may be that Turnbull in his book (which I haven't read) made some attempt to show the buoyancy of this evidently extraordinary people; if so, it is sunk by a production like a block of cement.
Curiously enough there is another piece in this week's batch that is played with the house lights up, but rather more justifiably since the work takes the form of a direct address to the audience by the single actor in the cast. The piece is Judgement, a National Theatre production on loan to the Royal Court, and the actor is Colin Blakely and both are impressive, especially the actor. He has the role of CaPtain Vukhov, one of seven captured Russian officers locked and abandoned in a monastery cellar bY retreating Germans during the second world war.
This is another starvation situation, for the men, as well as being deprived of their clothing, were left no food, and their prison is not discovered for two months. Nevertheless Vukhov and one other survive — having eaten the others. Vukhov's address is as to the tribunal convened to hear his account of the experience and to decide what is to be done with him, what guilt he bears and, essentiallY, whether there can ever be a justification for cannibalism, whatever the mitigating extrenlity. Probably it all goes on too long — in making our judgment, as the play asks us to do, it seems hardly necessary to consider separately and successively the manner of death of each of the five who perished, and the meals that were made of them — and Blakely has a hard tussle with the law of diminishing returns. He does beat the odds, though, by nicely judged variations of pace and intensity and by making the most of all the touches of irony in BarrY Collins's script, which, although a fiction derived from the meagrest facts, has a dreadful aura of authenticity. In their own place, the Old Vic, the National Theatre people were about more cheerful business last week in reviving Plunder, a 1928 farce by Ben Travers which has to do with a country-house jewel robbery planned by a dapper cracksman named Freddy Malone, who disastrously enlists as his accomplice a brainless young ass named D'Arcy Tuck. These parts were written for and played in the original production by Tom Walls and Ralph Lynn, and although Frank Finlay and Dinsdale Landen take them resourcefully enough here, the shades of those legendary farceurs rather haunt the proceedings. Played with the idiotic elan of its period, however, the piece has any number of droll and even hilarious moments. The robbery itself (the victim, played by Dandy Nichols, restlesslY sleeping as her jewel-case is being rifled) is rollickingly suspenseful; and the police interrogation of the two miscreants — Landen almost falling apart in nervous dither, FinlaY alternating suavity with sudden Basil Brush barks of disarming laughter, Derek Newark the nonplussed detective — is a small masterpiece of comic writing. Plunder belongs to an era in the history of our stage that seems to have been. dominated by blithe inconsequence; I should not wish it to return in full flood, but the 'National' is probably right to show us this specimen trickle.
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