ARTS & AMUSEMENTS

Lawful Ambitions

By ANTHONY BURGESS

inadmissible Evidence. (Wyndham's).—Widow- ere Houses. (Stratford, E.)—Return Ticket. (Duchess.) TIHNK carefully about John Osborne's Inad- missible Evidence and you will end up by calling it an animated novel. This will perhaps excuse everything—the lack of dialectic syn- thetising a crisis, of movement, of character interest outside the great solipsist pool of the central figure. It will excuse the excessive length and the stasis. Unfortunately, it's a play, not a Penny reading, and it's best to regard it as a dramatic experience that doesn't quite come off. But—and here's one of those nasty little para- doxes that bedevil all art—Osborne was only able to do the big thing that he has undoubtedly done by risking condemnation on the orthodox dramaturgical charges. He has put on the stage one of the most gigantic tragi-comic figures since Sir Giles Overreach. His Bill Maitland swallows the play, and the play has to be well lost. What We're given is a gross and fascinating monologue that needs no feeding from external events on the stage, nor—very much—from other characters. Bill Maitland is a massive eater, but he feeds Only on himself.

Critics who have compared this play with Death of a Salesman arc, I think, wide of the mark. Osborne's achievement is bigger than Miller's. The slow death he presents is not just of a class or a national dream (though those are very much there); it is rather of the death Which comes to all men with middle age— something waiting to come for forty years, since it's in a man's roots, but only reaching horrid bloom when it is seen that hope is part of time, but that time is going. Maitland is suffering from wanhopeothe big despair of the theologians. He's a solicitor who finds his own failures set d, own in the briefs of his clients—the failure to love, but, more than that, the surprised failure to be loved. He doesn't ask much, he thinks— Sex and a bit of tenderness. Where he, and all of US, go wrong is in taking it for granted that the asking can be all on one side.

Naturally, as this is a play by Mr. Osborne, the world that has let him down is not only his private one, but the public one—the horrible England of here and now. All the old values are going. Even law, civilised because it's slow, intri- cate, lumbered with the past, will be replaced °Y computers which will give a split-second verdict. Maitland's daughter is brought in—not

to say one word, merely to be harangued at.

Maitland inveighs against Youth, but his invec- tive is ambivalent, since youth, the lost time of ,?°Pe, is. so desirable and so irrecoverable. He ,i'ills willingly—since there's nothing else to be done- -into the muck of despair and self-pity, °ills, drink, lechery. He wins a kind of nobility "tit of this.

Nicol Williamson's interpretation of Maitland (and let's ignore the sheer mechanical achieve-

ment of learning so vast a part) is already, and

tightly, being rated as one of the wonders of the contemporary English stage. Everybody else Pales, perhaps deliberately. And there's no real attempt at a production. But I think Mr. William- son needs the prods and props—especially to-

wards the end, a restive time for the audience —which stiffer pace and vocal clarity matching his own could give. We begin to grow impatient, and this isn't fair to Mr. Williamson. But he ends as he begins—in a ghastly triumph of self- abasement and a brilliance which hardly once falters.

I note that some critics are lauding the oppor- tuneness of Stage Sixty's revival of Shaw's Widowers' Houses, as though he were the sole prophet of Rachmanism. Now, Rachmanism has been going on since the ancient dawn of rents, and Shaw's didacticism is not concerned with expressing the self-evident. His real interest is in showing how people, committed to a par- ticular way of life, will very easily adjust their philosophy—however theoretically humane and liberal—to maintain it. Dr. Trench and Mr. Sar- torius are not presented as essentially worse people because they live off slum rents and mortgages: we all live, whether we like it or not, off other people's misery (wretched, ill-paid, early-rising postmen have sped this copy to 99 Gower Street). And it isn't as though these two are asking for so very much: they're not heroic Gulbenkians. As if to point that people are not necessarily nasty because of ineluctable face- grinding, Shaw makes Blanche Sartorius a bad- tempered girl who, after haling her maid up and down in a Cleopatra manner, can become sweet- ness and light. She is what she is; she isn't just a product of economic forces. But, if all people

have some nastiness in them, it makes it easier for them to accommodate social injustices. This is part of Shaw's naturalistic approach to charac- ter; it has little to do with Karl Marx.

The Stratford production did well by the play, showing it as well-made and wittier than one remembered. John Warner reminded me that William de Burgh Cokane is a very juicy part, a devil of the status quo who can quietly, or not so, steal scenes. I don't think Jack May, a very fine actor, was deliberately injecting stage villainy into Sartorius—top hat and sepulchral sanctimony: this was !really what .sidesmen-

rentiers of his time were like. It was a richly naturalistic performance. Doreen Aris, as Blanche, was a horrid girl, highly seductive, and Bernard Lloyd's Trench was her natural foil. When Shaw invented the name 'Lickcheese' I think Dicken- sian onomatopoeia was at work: I wanted a bit more of the thin-vowelled whipped wretch from Jeffrey Segal. But this was a well-paced, relish- ing production, and nobody can now write off this play as mere inconsiderable 'early Shaw.' All the marks of mastery are there, and the often destructive quirks, which make Shaw a kind of Osborne, had not yet been born.

The Duchess audience seemed well pleased with the second night of William Corlett's Return Ticket, but London audiences are—to me, a Mancunian—a great source of innocent wonder. This blown-up tale of an artisan who, incredibly, wins the heart of a woman of wealth and cul- ture, but, foreseeably, goes back to his plump little wife, gasps for lack of oxygen well before the end of the first act. Such a waste—Sybil Thorndike, Ursula Howells, Megs Jenkins, Robert Brown and all—and hardly a line worth mouth- ing. But London audiences, chameleon-like, are quite likely to feed on the least nutritious air and find it promise-crammed. One musn't repine: without a perverse love of the inane, London's theatres would now be following Wren's churches.