Theatre
Occupational Therapy.
By ALAN BRIEN Make Me An Offer. (New.)— Treasure Island. (Mermaid.) —The Amorous Prawn. (Saville.)
Ii is not usually retnempered, even by Mr. Mankowitz, that the first of Wolf Mankowitz's dozen reputations was made as a savage, serious, moralistic New Critic. He was a Leavisite of the early post-war vintage. Disin- fected with enthusiasm, he would slip on his sur- gical coat, adjust his antiseptic mask, and pick up a work of art in sterile tongs for examination. By the time he had finished his dissection, it was diffi- cult to determine what species the victim was, let alone who he was. This apprenticeship taught Mr. Mankowitz never to waste a by-product. Having borrowed his glowing coal, he huffed and puffed it white hot. He then flogged the gas and the tar at a profit, and used the left-over coke to keep himself warm. Make Me An Offer has passed through every metamorphosis except an epic poem.
It is constructed, with characteristic Man- kowitzian generosity, to provide the maximum number of work-hours for a generation of un- employed PhDs. Never can a musical have packed into book and lyrics so many OK names for the Left-wing pedant. Veblen and Marx are paraphrased in demotic coffee-bar epigrams. One song even begins 'According to Jeremy Ben- tham . . .' and a Jewish dealer offers to provide 'the entire history of commerce while standing on one leg.' All the action is veneered with a self-consciously brutal cynicism and embossed with comments like 'the world is an economic hospital—everyone does a .different kind of basket-work as occupational therapy.' The inten- tion appears to be to make Brecht sound by com- parison like Bertolt Douglas Home.
Mr. Mankowitz, the Downing College old boy, rarely misses an opportunity to plug one of the seven types of ambiguity. When the hero's wife tells her husband, 'I've had my bellyful,' we are meant to realise that the dead metaphor has been given a kick of life by our knowledge that she is pregnant. As a money-maker, Mr. Mankowitz is ever ready to take a hint. As an artist, he still has not learned how to give one. Make Me An Offer suffers continually from his didactic glib- ness, from his insistence that his anti-commercial commercials must not be over-interrupted by entertainment. Still, only Wolf Mankowitz would dare force a middle-class audience to accept WEA commonplaces as witty inventions. Only Wolf would consider making a comic scene out of unfaithful husband ringing up his wife with thin excuses for absence in the presence of his new mistress. Make Me An Offer, like his Expresso Bongo, pioneers farther along the trail towards the satirical, contemporary, tough-minded British musical we are all waiting for.
Its relative failure is not all his fault—the whole production still has an amateurish, self-satisfied look and sound to it. Miss Littlewood is perhaps too like Mankowitz to be the ideal director. She is at her best in imprinting meaning and style upon the formless, yeasty dough of a Behan or a
• DeNney. Make Me An Offer is directed with a tr,5609s uncertainty of emphasis—the players are .1 nem, sure whether they are acting or singing whether they are communicating with us through each other or belting the message direct across the orchestra. The music and lyrics of Monty Norman and David Heneker, except in the rousing saloon- bar choruses of Portobello Road, or the ambi- tious lilting pathos of 1 Want a Lock-up, never seem to have enough backbone to carry the weight of social criticism they have to support. Both the wife and the mistress (Diana Coupland and Dilys Laye) are miscast. Miss Coupland looks sweet and dewy enough but her voice gets muffled some- where among the curtains. Miss Laye is far too determinedly kittenish and her fixed soubrette grin made my jaws ache just to watch it. Daniel Massey makes an engaging impact as the sham- bling innocent hero, but it is the minor characters who are really stamped with the genuine Little- wood hall-mark----Sheila Hancock, the frustrated, feckless spinster dreaming of being feck-worthy, Roy Kinnear, the twitching oaf of a scrap-dealer, and Victor Spinetti, the American snapper-up of over-considered trifles.
Most of Miss Littlewood's productions tart themselves up too much for their outings up West. I prefer them in their headscarves and curlers down at Stratford East. Make Me An Offer has been polished around the edges—Voytek's witty, stylish sets are better than ever—but it really needs to be dismantled and rebuilt from the foun- dations upwards. London's next most eastern theatre, the Mermaid by Blackfriars Bridge, is staging Treasure Island for Christmas. When I say staging, I mean staging—this must be the , best-equipped theatre in Britain. Raised only a few inches above the lowest foot level of the steeply-raked auditorium, the stage stretches from wall to wall without proscenium arch or curtains. Here the sets (practical, solid and attractive con- structions by Sean Kenny) have a life of their own. The Admiral Benbow Inn turns itself into the, Hispaniola. The stockade can be rearranged to suit any eye-view. The small boats are rowed backwards and forwards on the tide of the revolv- ing stage. The Mermaid Treasure Island is in three-dimensional CinemaScope.
For those who know and admire the book, this is jolly, simple-minded, party-charades entertain- ment. As a play, it hardly exists: one event follows another with the speed and precision of a gallop of circus ponies. Most of the chill, lonely, other-worldl horror of the novel has gone and the acting is not much above the level of a posse of enthusiastic uncles. Bernard Miles, as Long John Silver, is a pantomime figure but effectively odd and oddly effective in his own fashion of jovial blackguardistn.
The Amorous Prawn is about an English General Bilko who turns his army quarters into a posh hotel. It contains just about enough undemanding slapstick to fill a television half- hour and has one well-turned, hand-made comic caricature by the Scottish comedian Stanley Bax- ter as a sort of Corporal Slasher MacGreen. For the rest, there are only the usual depressingly obvious parody Americans and Miss Evelyn Laye acting the lady with the paralysing slowness and exaggerated miming of an English tourist on a day trip asking the way to Boulogne. Anthony Kimmins, the author, is apparently an expert on British Service life—it seems a pity that he should turn so much of his joke on the mistaken belief that the Secretary of State for War is a member of the Cabinet.
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