Theatre

Stone-Cold Symbols

By BAMBER GASCOIGNE

The Lady from the Sea. (Queen's.)—The Music Man. -(Adclphi.)—The Hollow Crown. (Ald- wych.) EACH new English ver- sion of Ibsen's plays (this production of T/►c Lady from the Sea is an adaptation by Ann M-

a licoe of Michael Meyer's

II translation) turns out to

be disappointingly like all the others. The fault, it would seem, was Ibsen's as much as Archer's. The harsh truth is that Ibsen, once he had given up poetic drama, wrote the most abstract and arid prose of any major dramatist (though Pirandello, perhaps, runs him a close second). His plays abound in symbols, but they totally lack the incidental imagery which gives dialogue a rich texture. To realise this one merely has to take any speech of Ibsen's and set it beside one by Giraudoux or Anouilh, Williams or Miller, Whiting or Osborne. At the final meeting between John Proctor and

his wife in The Crucible, she confesses to him : 'It needs a cold wife to prompt lechery. . . . It were a cold house 1 kept.' This is very simple, yet intensely vivid. In an Ibsen play there would be the same image of coldness, but it would have been drained out of the language and set up on its own. We would either be told an apparently irrelevant story by some minor character about how an unexpected frost has killed all the flowers this year, or else, more likely, Proctor would shiver and start poking away at the sym- bolic stove.

PnorroR: 1• can't make this stove burn.

FRU ELISABETH: I should have had it repaired long ago. It is my fault, Johan. If I had shown you more devotion, even just more affection, you would not have felt the need to satisfy your desires elsewhere.

This lack of imagery doesn't matter in Ibsen's better plays, where his plots are taut and his symbols are a part of everyday life and therefore lend it a certain richness. But it matters a great deal in The Lady front the Sea, which has a

loose plot and a highly poetic, even magic, set of symbols. The characters in it veer between two extremes. They are either referring to Ellida as a dying mermaid, or else discussing Free Will and Responsibility.

Ellida is a woman who is trapped in a mar- riage of convenience, without real love or pur- pose. Her sense of imprisonment results in haunting dreams of the sea and of a dark, romantic sailor to whom she was betrothed. These dreams make her want to break her mar- riage contract, until eventually her husband agrees to let her do so. It may be the right thing for her to go, he says, and he loves her enough to let her do so if she wants. But then, with the prison bars broken, the dreams vanish. She can stay at home, and real love and honesty can begin. It is the opposite conclusion from The Doll's House; but not bequse Ibsen is here being cynical or because his attitude has changed— merely because the situation is different. Nora left home to acquire her freedom. Ellida stays at home because she is given it. This new pro- duction by Glen Byam Shaw is excellent; the whole 'cast. headed by Margaret Leighton as Ellida, is good; and there are delightful sets by Motley. Even so, the play pulled them down. It remained, for me, an exercise in painless cultural education, not an evening of drama.

The Music Man is a musical from the corn belt in every sense of the word. It is set in Iowa before the First World War, and contains a close- harmony quartet weaving their way through 'Lida Rose,' much satire on middle-aged amateur ladies trying to sing and dance, a horse that is led on to the stage, and two cute performing children—one of whom, for good comic mea- sure, has to struggle with a thiththy thort of lithp. Then there are the inevitable cultural references. Besides the joke of calling Balzac Balls-ack (five times repeated) there are .lines such as these, from a romantic ditty called 'My White Knight': `If he occasionally ponders what made Shakespeare or Beethoven great,/Him I would love till I die.' The show's only merit is in a few of the songs which are in a rapid form of sprechgesang, based in most cases on the rhythms of public transport; but even these back- fired because the hero (Van Johnson) found them much too difficult to sing and panted agon- isingly between laps.

In one respect the show is less nauseating here than it was on Broadway. Over there the lisping boy (called Winthrop) was played by such a tiny little chap—he looked about four years old— that all our hearts melted whenever he turned up. It was impressive enough that he could walk about on the stage, let alone sing. But here, thanks presumably to our minimum age of twelve for stage appearances, Winthrop is played by a per- fectly competent youngster. It is typical of this show that his effect should be so much less, merely because his abilities are so much greater. The Music Man has been running in New York for three years. It would be pleasant if we could trade it in within three months for Gipsy (Jerome Robbins's successor to West Side Story), but I suppose that's an idle dream. Giving the audience that homely feeling that they could do just as well themselves is one well-proved in- gredient of success.

On Sunday night the Stratford Company pre- sented The Hollow Crown, an anthology about the kings and queens of England. John Barton, the compiler, came up with some unexpected pieces. Who, for instance, knew that Jane Austen wrote at the age of fifteen 'a Partial, Prejudiced and Ignorant' history of the monarchy? In it she decided, charmingly, that there were never so few `amiable gentlemen' in this country as during the Commonwealth. Dorothy Tutin, look- ing almost too distractingly beautiful in the num- ber one dress of the season, read excellently; and Max Adrian was superb as the ambassador who was charged by Henry VII to send back informa- tion about his prospective bride, the Queen of Naples, with particular emphasis on the state of her teeth, breath and 'paps.'

There should be compulsory performances of this anthology for all those who were outraged by Altrincham's and Muggeridge's criticism of the Queen a few years ago. They would realise, as John Barton lets them sample sharp English tongues from the Anglo-Saxon chroniclers down to Thackeray and Greville, that never before this century have we been so courteous to our monarchs. Even the Times, speaking for the top people of 1830, asked rhetorically on the morn- ing after George IV's death: 'What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow?'