26 APRIL 1957, Page 18

BOOKS

Polly Brown and Maggie Smith

By IAIN HAMILTON WHAT the theatre ought to be is theatrical; and what is theatrical ought to be poetic; and what is poetic ought to be exciting. Let either Apollo or Dionysus be appeased. If both can be propitiated by the play-in-performance, so much the better; but if neither, then you may be sure that what we playgoing mortals are left to chew over is a dull, ashen confection of the sort that has only recently ceased to fill entirely the play- shops of Shaftesbury Avenue. Ah, the dusty memory of droning evenings and the paralysing stupor which they generated so remorselessly and laid upon us all from the gods to the stalls!

I am not at all sure that Mr. J. B. Priestley is quite fair to the critics in the Hubert Henry Davies lecture which he gave at the Old Vic last September and is now published with sundry appendices and discursive notes.* He says that they want, many of them, to sweep away the droning English naturalistic kind of play because they have been bored by having to sit through so many droning naturalistic English plays.

Can a better reason be imagined? Not by me.

Mr. Priestley, however, speaks in a tone of mild reproof. But should critics really feel a stab of guilt as well as a surge of relief when they come upon Arthur Miller, Giraudoux, Garcia Lorca, Anouilh, Beckett, Pirandello, Tennessee Williams, Bert Brecht or any other bloody foreigner who does not write in that mumbling, rniddling,middle- brow way that has almost succeeded (together with other enemies of promise) in taking the guts out of the English theatre altogether? Without guts there can be precious little excitement, although no doubt the substitution of slightly damp cotton wool can ensure plenty of 'enter- tainment' in the debased sense. Mr. Priestley seems to me a great deal too tender towards a tradition which has nothing at all to commend it but the fact that at its most vulgar and inept it can pull in the charabancs night after night for many profitable months. He says himself that he would like to abandon the proscenium arch and work with a platform-stage thirty feet in diameter in the middle of not too large an arena. So far, so good. There is certainly a great deal to be said for the 'theatre-ht-the-round,' so long as it is not made an end in itself. But this kind of ambition strikes me as secondary. What matters first is what's said in the theatre, whatever shape it is. We should not have a rejuvenated theatre if we simply sat on top of, instead of seeing from a distance in a picture-frame, a lot of 'real' every- day characters in 'real' everyday situations throw- * THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST. (Heinemann, 10s. 6d.) ing away conversationally their `real' everyday lines. Mr. Priestley is a skilful dramatist of great resource, and this little book of his is packed with shrewd and sound observations on all aspects of the dramatist's art and its application; but there are also all sorts of niggling and contra- dictory notes to offset the splendid generalisa- tions and to give the impression that he is trying to have it all ways at once, and these are very puzzling indeed.

But what he seems reluctant to recognise (for all that he states explicitly : . . theatrical conventions change, and what was bold, Original, exciting theatre yesterday may now seem too artificial, tedious, wearisome') is that inexorable decree of time that certain things cease to be worth doing at all, whether well or badly, because they are no longer capable of generating that par- ticular illuminating excitement that he and we call dramatic experience.

The more I reread certain passages in his lec- ture and notes the more puzzling I find his attitude. For Mr. Priestley time and time again adopts the well-known attitudes and arguments of the very criticis who displease him in one way or another. He certainly knows as well as anyone and better than most the paradox at the heart of effective dramatic experience, whereby the blatantly unreal becomes more genuinely real than the 'realistic'; and yet he goes on talking about 'realistic' plays (i.e., such elaborately naturalistic plays as destroy the theatrical and poetic element in favour of a pale imitation of the mere appearances of life) as if they could still have in this day and age some valid correspon- dence with whatever we know intuitively as reality. In my opinion this makes his argument muddled, if not indeed peevish, when he comes, say, to discuss Mr. Walter Kerr's demand for more 'poetry' in the theatre. Very few people nowadays, I should imagine, think that the argu- ment is between verse and prose in the theatre. The total effect of a play is, or should be, poetic in its nature, and it matters no more than a very small damn whether the play in its parts is com- posed of verse or prose or a mixture of both. What critics mean when they demand more poetry in the theatre is not necessarily the clipped cadences of Mr. Eliot or the floribundant periods of Mr. Fry or the raw lyricism of the earlier Lorca or the blank blank verse of you-know-who, but quite simply better drama—more of that high- tension excitement in which the human condition is illumined startlingly, shockingly, authentically. What this kind of experience has to do with what I take Mr. Priestley to mean when he talks about 'realism,' I cannot for the life of me imagine. I maintain that the phrase 'poetic drama' is tautological : all drama is . poetic or it is nothing, and the chances are that it will be written in prose today rather than in verse.

Mr. John Osborne's prose, for example. Here I should join issue again with Mr. Priestley. 'On the level,' he writes, `of theatrical construction, contrivance, effectiveness, tact, Look Back In Anger is anything but a good play.' (He then goes on to say that the dialogue 'exactly caught the tone and temper of a large section of our younger people.') Now it seems to me that by writing about this play as if he were an adjudicator at an amateur drama festival, or even one of those Sardoodledummers whom he rightly mocks for having failed to see the virtues of Chekhov or Ibsen, Mr. Priestley does less than full justice to Mr. Osborne's achievement; for if dramatic ex- perience is the thing that matters, then that is what playgoers at the Court Theatre got in full measure whether they liked it or not—and what- ever the moral judgements that they made later upon the author's presentation of the hero.

By chance I went to see Mr. Osborne's new play The Entertainer just after reading Mr. Priestley's lecture, and I was struck by the way it exemplified so many of the excellent points which the older dramatist makes. Let us suppose, says Mr. Priestley, that the actress Polly Brown is playing Maggie Smith : the real dramatic experi- ence comes not from the personality or skill of Polly Brown nor from the 'character' of Maggie Smith but from the formula Polly-Brown-play- ing-Maggie-Smith. Here at the Court we had, thanks to Mr. Osborne, Sir-Laurence-Olivier- playing-Archie-Rice-playing-The-Entertainer — a formula positively Pirandellian in its fruitfulness, embedded in a context in which the levels of 'Theatre' and 'Life' were inextricably interwoven. This is not an experience possible within the naturalistic mode which Mr. Priestley still, though with no great conviction, defends. Brecht, says Mr. Priestley, drives from the playhouse all that he wishes to retain. Yet one may see at the Court Theatre, in a production which Brecht himself would have recognised as breathing the same air, the very qualities which Mr. Priestley, in other paragraphs, wishes to foster.

It is, as I have said, all very puzzling. On which bzmused note the curtain may suitably fall.