Watch this space ARTS
JOHN HIGGINS
Of all the underground theatres which have opened in London during the past few weeks none has made a better start than The Open Space, to be found in a cellar just past the Continentale Cinema (Seventeen and Sex Quar- tet) in Tottenham Court Road. Maybe John Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes is a shade old-fashioned; maybe on the surface it looks like another slice of verismo; but it speaks with a strong, clear and emotional voice. It is worth all those chained ladies and fig leaves, which have formed part of our midsummer madness, wrapped together.
The courtroom has long been one of the main props for dramatists short of a subject. Jail, the next stage on, has generally been left to the cinema. Yet even here as many punches have been pulled as delivered. When Henry Fonda was being roughed up under the direc- tion of Fritz Lang in the 'thirties there was always the promise of escape in the next reel; ten years later a crack of humanity was going to break through William Hartnell's impassive features while he was dealing with the Borstal boys. Even Brendan Behan's account of his humiliation at the hands of the Liverpool screws was made acceptable by flashes of generosity on the part of the old lags.
John Herbert will have none of this. The cell of the Canadian Reformatory, where his play is set, is described precisely as 'a prep- school for the Penitentiary.' Far from offering hope of escape, it is a place of constant return. Once outside it is merely a matter of how much time passes before you hole up inside again.
The special hell of the room in which Smitty finds himself is other people. It is a huis clos with four faces and a warder instead of three. The other inmates are all there on homosexual offences: Queenie is what his name implies, a flamboyant male tart; Mona is the soft poove from the broken home; Ricky is the would-be tough-guy pimp. In such an atmosphere you must have a protector—John Herbert makes the grim point that prison is simply a micro- cosm of the world with the same corruptions operating in sharper focus. Smitty is propo- sitioned by each of the men, both sexually and for the purpose of forming an alliance of domination. Rocky is turned down and then Queenie. It is the final liaison with Mona, the only one with a shred of decency, which brings up the house lights on as pessimistic a con- clusion as we've seen for a long while.
The play has faults. The backgrounds of the men are too meticulously written in along conventional Hollywood sociological lines, and the long scene between Smitty and Mona is over-sentimental in the context of the evening. But John Herbert's dialogue is fierce and brilliant: comic in Queenie's flirtatious line of queer asides, only too convincingly harsh when the pent-up feelings of mutual hatred overflow. Robert Noway gives a remarkable performance as the boy who in a few weeks is corrupted for life, and there is first-rate sup- port from Al Mancini, Peter Marinker, Louis Negin and George Margo under Charles Maro- witz's direction. Fortune and Men's Eyes and
Hotel in Amsterdam are currently the two best- acted plays in London.
In his essay on The Tempest Jan Kott makes the point that Prospero's island is a prison, and, Herbert-like, he finds the world reflected there. Not for Kott the Arcady which genera- tions of misguided theatre directors have been fobbing us off with, but instead a place where human flaws and weaknesses are as present as anywhere else.
This idea seems to be hovering over David Jones's Chichester production. Ralph Koltai, still in the handsome white mood of As You Like it, has produced a snowy waste in which vanilla men parade under the shadow of a large creamy saucer and a ball, which at one point opens to reveal Miranda and Ferdinand curled up as twin foetuses inside. There is no harm in this approach to The Tempest, which, goodness knows, needs some imaginative help along its three-hour path, provided there is a reasonable unity about the whole conception and some ultimate justification.
Alas, Chichester provides neither. Aridl (Richard Kane), whey-faced and distraught, dressed in some old barrage balloon material, swims around the stage, his arms paddling fin- like—surprisingly, Caliban still attracts Trin- culo's comment, 'What have we here? a man or a fish? Dead or alive?'; Trinculo himself does a conventional sub-Douglas Byng act. The court wear doublet and hose, yet sit uncon- cernedly on perspex boxes. The ethereal music for Ariel's first song is improbably interrupted by watchdogs barking in case we've missed that particular line. John Clements's Prospero is a dull fellow, with all the pomposity of a Moses freshly down from the mountain after the latest summit conference. It is an odd production, to which whiteness adds nothing but dullness.
A heavyweight week—it might almost have been devised as a reproof to critics who spend too much of their time fretting about the bunkers at Carnoustie or Graveney gashing his knuckles at a kindergarten fête—was rounded off by more minor Shakespeare. The Regent's Park Two Gentlemen of Verona and the RSC'S Merry Wives of Windsor, described by Hilary Spurling at Stratford and now at the Aldwych, have little in common except that they both use the old gag of a character stepping in dog excrement. Brewster Mason remains a tower of normality and Ian Richardson a ball of fury in a Merry Wives played for rather more than it is worth, yet still highly enjoyable.
Two Gentlemen is much more demure, a romantic comedy with occasional interludes of
lachrymose punning from Bernard Bresslaw as Launce. Collectors of stage animals will be glad to know that the sour-natured hound Crab—presumably the onlie begetter of the gag mentioned above—is as wistful and put_ upon a creature as his master. Richard Digby Day has given his production a Victorian set- ting, making sure that his actors are well clothed against the winds that get up from the polar regions of Mappin Terrace, and having made his decision he remains true to it— Chichester please note. Launce arrives singing 'Champagne Charlie' and Valentine hums a few bars from Deh, vieni alla finestra,' an apt enough serenade for a Victorian suitor. The four lovers, John Quentin, Peter Egan, Gemma Jones and Celia Bannerman, speak and move well, and James Cairncross is an excellent Duke of Milan. As always at Regent's Park, allow about lOs over the ticket price for two blankets at 9d and two Irish coffees at 4s 6d; the balance of the expenditure can, of course, be altered according to the temperature of the evening.
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