Theatre
Star watching
Mark Amory
Insignificance (Royal Court) Beowulf (Lyric, Hammersmith) plays in which the characters have no names are off to as unpromising a start as plays in which they have facetious ones. Would you rather watch the Man and the Woman or Lord Broadbelly and Lady Dim- wit? Insignificance concerns the Professor, the Senator, the Actress and the Ball Player, which suggests at least significance and perhaps pretension as well as sounding like the beginning of a dirty joke. The set, however, is a brightly lit New York room dominated by a double bed beyond which We can see a backcloth of skyscrapers which turn out on closer inspection to be made of doodled equations — all of which looks like smart comedy. The Professor has an Albert Einstein wig on. Soon the Actress appears with the voice of, though a less full figure than, Marilyn Monroe. None of this is Misleading. It is a smart, significant comedy using these characters. The Ball Player is Married to Monroe, as was Joe diMaggio. The Senator is a nasty bully who threatens to expose people as communists, though he turns out to be working for the President (Eisenhower) as Joe McCarthy would not have done.
This cast sound as if they could only belong in an autobiographical drama by Arthur Miller but it is more like a game of consequences after the manner of Stop- Pard's Travesties. As you remember, he discovered that Lenin, Tristan Tzara and James Joyce had all been in Zurich at the same time and involved them all, inventing their lines but remaining faithful to their views, I do not know if Einstein was in New York in 1953 but that may be why the mak- ing of the identifiable but unnamed The Seven Year Itch has been pushed back at least a year. 'Monroe' thinks she is playing a fantasy in that, not the girl in the apart- °lent above; but that could, just, be her
mistake not that of the author, Terry Johnson.
Although there are stolen documents, at- tempted seductions (2), a blow, a miscar- riage and a parting, it feels static and talky. So what is the talk, and therefore the play, about? Many things, so let us select. I en- joy, but cannot take seriously, something that happens more often in films than plays, a character suddenly mouthing the title, as, for instance, when Natalie Wood was reciting poetry in class and paused to swallow before the words ... Splendour in the Grass.' No phrase can bear such em- phasis. Here there is a tactful, negative ver- sion, the Professor saying that the stars make him feel small and lonely but not in- significant: 'The stars tell us we can walk on the grass, talk to anyone we meet .... The stars won't think the worse of you. The stars won't even notice.' So you might think that there was the somewhat cryptic author's message. But we also discover that 'Einstein' is only pretending to work, paralysed by the guilt of his possible responsibility for the atom bomb and poor 'Monroe' after giving a gripping lecture on the theory of relativity (not far from the challenge of holding your audience while you read the telephone directory, and hold us she did) is ticked off for acquiring knowledge without understanding. The Senator has a quick go at solipsism and diMaggio may well represent Feeling, the importance of; or possibly contribute to Fame, the price of. There is a quote from the real Einstein about the motives that lead men to Art and Science printed before the text, a telling position. So serious topics abound and seem to combine to say, roughly, that you must create a personal world and persevere with it. It is all very stylish and the writing is acute and tellingly theatrical. All the acting is impressive, with Judy Davis on the way to a brilliant career, evoking the private Monroe by the way her hands smooth her skirts or her vowels gurgle like bathwater. The soppy moments are unplayable because these are not people and I had had enough before the end, but Terry Johnson can certainly write plays.
Tonight I am going to Beowulf perform- ed by one man in his own adaptation. It promises to be a highspot of tedium even for one who has sat contentedly through five hours of Faust in Swedish ... which just shows how wrong prognoses can be. Julian Glover, casually dressed, wanders onto the stage, says 'Listen', cupping his ears with his hands, 'Hear', holding out his arms and beckoning, and is off. His pro- gramme note refers to a rattling good yarn but, after he has mercifully removed the
'Do you fancy a romantic supper?'
relations and complications, in the sense of having a strong plot, it is not. There is a monster, Grendel; Beowulf appears and slays him. Grendel turns out to have had a mother; Beowulf kills her. Years pass and a conventional fire-breathing dragon pops up; Beowulf destroys it but is himself destroyed. Simple stuff, which grips through the rough vigour of the alliterative translation, performance and detail. Grendel is a creature of the fens and the night, whose mighty arm is ripped from him, his mother lives at the bottom of a lake so deep that Beowulf has to swim down till 'nearly noon' to reach her underground caverns. It has the pleasures of a good guy as strong as Ian Botham in something between a horror and a Walt Disney film but it is better than that too. A strange interlude of melancholy lingers on the passing of heroes, daringly interspersed lines from the original sound a little like Welsh with an occasional German word, there are one or two laughs, but above all the language summons up the creature ranging the misty moorland or beneath the death daubed waters. Famous classics sometimes turn out to be as good as their reputation.
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