I heaIre
Luminous Names
By ALAN BRIEN BRECHT and Shaw are two luminous names in my nonconformist theatre, two agnostic saints in my political calendar whose literafy relics still work miracles, two dan- gerous sappers whose hidden mines continue their posthumous devastation. The men them- selves incarnated in their own lives all these tensions and ironies which they atomised through their work. It is possible that each was a greater subject for play than any subject he found out- side himself. Superficially they could hardly be more opposite somatotypes. Shaw was a skinny, vegetarian, aggressive, sexless, ingenious, epi- grammatic polymath—a power worshipper who had never been in anyone's power in his long famous life. Brecht was a short, sly sensual, blunt, middle-class peasant—another power wor- shipper but one who shone his lantern in the threatening shadow of both the Un-American Activities Committee and the Politbureau. Neither Brecht nor Shaw much admired the romantic virtue of originality. One pillaged Villon, Marx, Gay, Waley, Shakespeare and his own contemporaries, while the other ran- sacked Butler, Dickens, Moliere, Ibsen, Shake- speare and his own contemporaries. Yet they had keener eyesight than any of their fellows— they saw the greed beneath the philanthropy, the cruelty beneath the charity, the closed mind beneath the freethinking brow, the humanity beneath the rags. And their exercises in dramatic collage had a cumulative originality which has affected the theatre of the world.
A week which presents one play by Brecht, one by Shaw and one about and yet still by Shaw should provide a high peak in a critic's life. I'm afraid this week didn't for this critic. Honesty, finally, is the only real criterion for a critic. It is tempting to sit laughing and giggling at a cheap, cheesy farce, and then report only its inferiority and vulgarity. But a laugh is a laugh and should also be recorded. It is even more tempting to watch a play full of incidental insights, courageous intention and unorthodox opinions which still bores for aeons at a stretch and then write about the masterpiece that the author attempted to create rather than the inter- mittent, heavy-handed thesis play which he ac- tually produced. The fair critic must be prepared to play the philistine, to chart his own vagaries and emotions, to reveal that he is occasionally the sucker for a transparent confidence trick or the cynic in the face of an unsuccessful bid for immortality.
The Life of Galileo is designed as an epic inside out—a tragedy in which the great man is in the flaw, trapped like a broken-nerved climber in a cleft of rock. The alienation-effect is switched full on throughout. All narrative surprise is deliberately avoided by lantern-slide verses which announce the result of each scene before it opens. Any identification with Galileo is forestalled by emphasising his failure to accept the heroic role offered him by society. Brecht's aim is presum- ably to present a clinical study of a defeat of progress in order to teach us to avoid such failures in the future. But hardly any of these intentions completely succeed. The verses are hardly necessary for anyone with a nodding acquaintance of history and they are written in such childish doggerel that they arouse irritation rather than satisfaction. Surely the lyric genius hailed by our German-speaking critics could manage something better than 'No one's virtue is complete, Great Galileo liked to eat. You will not resent, we hope, The truth about his tele- scope,' and to rhyme `Galilei' three times with 'way' and once with 'say' is to deny the resources of any language. Nor can the playgoer be ex- pected to condemn Galileo for failing to unseat the Catholic Church from the centre of its own universe. Even the famous cynical proverbs of Brecht—'To hell with the pearl, give me the healthy oyster,' or 'Unhappy is the land that needs a hero'—hardly ring out with quite the deafening newness we had been promised.
Much of the first act, with Bernard Miles as Galileo continually explaining the Copernican theory with a kind of cocky glumness, hangs heavily in great loops of tedium. The play only begins in the second act and here writing and direction combine in some splendidly theatrical effects—the all-fools parade of guys and gulls intoxicated by the licentious implications of Galileo's abolition of heaven, the ceremonial robing of the new scientist Pope while the In- quisitor pours in his ear the old serpent's advice. In the conversation between the humble country monk and the arrogant astronomer, Brecht's language gains a sinewy strength and a humane wisdom which are notably lacking from much of the play. Too often the production crawls along with pious mildness, the supers are hardly equal to the standards of open-air Shakespeare, and even Bernard Miles eventually achieving an impressive blend of cowardly common sense as the aged, imprisoned star-gazer cannot bring The Life of Galileo within spitting distance of St. Joan.
There are not many signs of the Shaw of St. Joan in Candida. Instead of being comic Ibsen as is so often suggested, Candida plays much more like didactic Barrie—it might be called What Every Fabian Woman Knows. The sacchar- ine charmer of a heroine, the flirtatious mama who loves teasing her too precocious little boy- men, is a vegetarian's dream of sex and I cannot help feeling Shaw was more excited at the thought of her smacks than her caresses. She is played with a slow twinkle by Dulcie Gray as if she were coaxing the audience to eat up its porridge and snuggle into its cot. Michael Denison avoids making the Rev. James Morell too cosily Chris- tian and settles for the best compromise by turn- ing him into a complp 'ently intellectual Mr. Darling. Marchbanks is a stagy invention who seems to have little connection with reality and I suppose Jeremy Spenser's short-pants Colin Wilson is as good an interpretation as any. But, as always when Shaw tries to write beautiful prose,' Marchbanks's eloquence turns out to be little more than Georgian poetry and soda water. Gillian Raine is a superb Prossy and Frank Hauser's production, as so often with him, seems to have far better general ideas than particular achievements. Freudians will find much innocent pleasure in Shaw's image of the gate of heaven (complete with angel with flaming sword, what's more) as a euphemism for Candida's favours.
Dear Liar is the story of Shaw the amorist in more or less real life adapted by Jerome Kilty from GBS's correspondence with Mrs. Patrick Campbell. It turns out to be neither roast beef nor nut cutlet. There are some explosive Shavian jokes, occasional incongruous jets of emotion, and long stretches of chatty, unbuttoned gossip. Mr. Kilty should either have written a play about Shaw (what a perfect subject for Terence Ratti- gan) or read the letters in the style of an Emlyn Williams evening of Dickens. The half-acting half - spouting, half - situation half - comment, method is an uncomfortable confusion of con- ventions. Mr. Kilty himself catches a great deal of the Joey inside the GBS without ever attempting an impersonation, but Cavada Hum- phrey almost entirely lacks the candelabra dazzle of Mrs. Pat. A passable evening for slow readers who have lost the old-fashioned habit of actually turning over the pages of a book.
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