THEATRE
The plot thickens
HILARY SPURLING
Cat Among the Pigeons! (Prince of Wales) George Dandin (Theatre de la Cite at the Aldwych) Anne of Green Gables (New) Developments in the strange and fiendish case of Feydeau's Cat Among the Pigeons! will no doubt be long debated. Indeed, the prepos- - terous implications of clues as slender as, say, an ear of corn, a window opened on a breezy day, a gun accidentally left behind on a hall table, may perhaps never be fully disentangled. For, on the spot, there is barely time to grasp the horror of each new calamity before we are inextricably embroiled in the next. Inklings of disaster are no sooner inkled than fulfilled —and fulfilled on such a scale and at such speed that the mind boggles and passes, still feebly boggling, to a fresh part of the plot.
And yet this plot—sprouting with what, if it were not at every point so eminently rational, one might well call a demented logic —is knit from thfttsimplest and most familiar motives. It swirls and tangles in a setting whose every detail is scrupulously common- place, among people who, if possibly a trifle dim, are still studiously normal, and for reasons which are throughout absolutely piffling.
Cowardice, complacency, conceit and an im- placable self-interest provide the basic force.
And the prime mover is none other than that elementary, Wodehousian principle of fear— not to say terror-crazed panic—at the prospect of social embarrassment.
This is the kind of politeness which, for in- stance, impels a gentleman to drop his latch- key down a fainting lady's dress—even though, as he does it, he protests that keys are for nosebleeds not fainting fits, and, moreover, dimly suspects the perfectly appalling conse- quences which must follow when he re- turns home to find himself locked out, and knows, furthermore, that this particular faint- ing fit is a ruse employed through sheer malice on the lady's part and that there is, therefore, not the faintest hope—even if there were time which, considering the quite separate, hideous and immediately pressing predicament in which he is simultaneously in- volved, there isn't—of his regaining the key, and so averting what will, in the next act inevitably swell into a catastrophe, or rather a series of catastrophes, still more fearful and more ignominious than any he has yet endured.
Such are the intimations which flash,iin a kind of spasm of chill premonition, across the mind at any one split second of this master- piece of farce. And, in Jacques Charon's pro- duction, we follow with meticulous precision the dire, inexorable and insanely lucid° chain reactions which convulse the protagonists, or send them scooting, lurching, madly jerking over the stage, much to the amusement of inquisitive and aggravating bystanders. For, as always in Feydeau, bystanders are plentiful,
cruelly perceptive and, however much in- trigued, deeply unimpressed by the spectacle of others in distress.
Hounded, badgered, cornered finally in his underpants on the stairwell of his own apart- ment by a troupe of maddened wedding guests, Richard Briers, as our hero, has a habit, in- finitely pathetic, of turning up the whites of his eyes and going limp, in a paroxysm of despair, at moments as sickening as this one. More often than not, however, his way with a crisis is brisk and dashing—as when, for in- stance, he is discovered, at an excruciatingly inopportune moment, cowering in a cupboard, dumb with fright. 'What are you doing in there?' asks his astounded mistress. 'Me?' replies Mr Briers, with such outrage on his
face and such fervent incredulity in his voice that for two pins one would accept his sub- mission that -he isn't there or, alternatively, that he isn't him.
Victor Spinetti is entrancing as a Spanish general of ineffable condescension, unspeak- able grandeur and ferocious bloodthirst; Murray Melvin, as an aggrieved and indigent lawyer's clerk, shares with him a massive con- viction of the power of his own, dingier charms; and Elizabeth Seal, as the tempestuous and malevolent lady responsible for innumer- able debacles, makes a properly masterful Lucette. The large cast is without exception excellent, on a level seldom attempted or achieved outside ' the subsidised companies; Andre Levasseur's sets are as loud, gay, ex- travagant and assertive as the text itself; and not the least pleasing aspect of the whole affair is the fact that the same director, de- signer and translator (John Mortimer, who makes a dazzling combination with Feydeau) were responsible for that other, similarly triumphant production, of the same play- wright's Flea in Her Ear at the National Theatre three years ago. This apparently simple deduction—that what works once may work again—seems to me a singularly heartening sign in what has otherwise been so far a dismal season for West End managements.
And so to Moliere, in a second, brilliant pro- duction by Roger Planchon which most deli- cately preserves the play's surface gaiety against sombre undertones of pain and punish- ment. The whole is dominated by a formidable George Dandin (Jean Bouise), whose clumsy movements and yellowing buck teeth are by no means reassuring as he watches, with a savage, brooding impotence, the expression of sneering impudence on the marquis's face, spiteful triumph on his wife's. Blue summer skies, the very solidity of the farmhouse walls, somehow contrive to mock him. This is a per- formance which uncannily conveys the height- ened perceptions and the arid, stifling bitter- ness of jealousy: a state in which the suspicion of a smile, a rustling in the straw, the click of a wooden latch may all be construed as evidence, both cruel and elusive, of betrayal. M Planchon's company achieves a peak not often scaled, even in the World Theatre Season.
Anne of Green Gables, meanwhile, poses a • curious conundrum: this is a sedate, innocuous and remarkably faithful musical re-creation of a tale of small-town, prattle, Sunday school picnics, little tears .and artless laughter, com- posed half a century ago to beguile and edify small girls; why it should be Welcomed, with such evident enthusiasm, by audiences of grown men and women in 1969 is beyond me, though a pleasure to record.- Polly James has our heroine to perfection.
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