Snobs go home ARTS
HILARY SPURLING
`What I try to do, you understand, is analyse stylistically the fragment of terror which is the human condition,' says John Morley, poet and hero of Paddy Chayefsky's new play, The Latent Heterosexual, at the Aldwych. 'Kazin thought the whole thing gibberish. You son of a bitch, I said, forty thousand in hardback alone isn't gibberish.' Our hero's outlook, at once so turgid and so shrewd, is familiar enough among the grand coquettes of American liter- ary politics; and the joke is uncomfortably near the bone. For it is presumably the fact that Mr Chayefsky's play isn't gibberish—that it is, on the contrary, vastly entertaining and likely to give grounds for considerable envy among com- mercial managements—which explains the kind of patronising condescension with which it has been generally received.
There is something particularly dispiriting about the sort of pompous smugness which, While passively accepting so much that is glib, mawkish or pretentious, can still disapprove— and for purely snobbish reasons—a play that is none of these things. If we are blind to a play as rich as this one in the traditional virtues, then one must feel extremely dubious as to the chances of any genuinely 'new' or revolution- ary piece of work being recognised, if we ever saw one. In the meantime, one can only be grateful to Terry Hands who, as company direc- tor, presumably chose the play and who also directs it with a wit, a hard precision and an exuberant energy to match its author's.
Perhaps the oddest thing about this extremely odd play is its language, which, for once—in- deed for the first time in years—makes exacting demands on this company's superb technical resources. And, considering the prodigious efforts regularly required of them in order to restore any kind of meaning, let alone spon- taneity, to Shakespeare—whose every major speech is, after all, by now a tissue of Clichés— it is a rare pleasure to watch these actors re- spond, with the same delicacy and humour, to language such as she is currently spoke. Take, for instance, the lawyer's account (delivered with magnificent aplomb by Barry Stanton) of visiting his client's home, an exotic, pitch-dark, incense-laden pop palace, scene of strange orgies and no doubt sordid enough in actual fact. But here, cast as a kind of messenger speech and retailed to an awed and silent chorus of business colleagues, it has much the same effect—a splash of brilliant colour and violent action framed against the office background— as heroic deeds presumably once had for watchers on the palace steps. Or take Lee Montague's unutterably smooth performance on the telephone when, while negotiating one tricky deal, dodging another and clinching a third, he simultaneously dictates a letter in a financial jargon of dazzling and impenetrable obscurity. This kind of verbal richness—woven from the pomposities, the casual humour and banality of contemporary speech—together with the rounds of applause which greeted it, is something I have heard only twice befOre- for Lucky's speech in Godot and, on a com- paratively hit-or-miss basis, for David HaIti- well's Little Malcolm. The last was generally esteemed, presumably because its characters were scruffy and revolting youths, not middle- aged businessmen who, for reasons unknown, invite conventional disapproval.
And yet this is an extraordinarily crude re- sponse to what, at any rate in the first half of Mr Chayefsky's play, is uncommonly complex. This first half takes place inside the tax con- sultant's office—a glittering, inner sanctum where pallid, shirt-sleeved acolytes move stealth- ily, intoning incantations or responses at once severely practical and hopelessly abstruse. To them comes Morley (a brilliant performance by Roy Dotrice) in search of tax relief : a roguish, robed and bead-hung queer whose affectations seem peculiarly garish in these austere sur- roundings. We watch him consult, invoke, placate and finally submit to the unfathomable workings of the financial oracle. The outside world—the world of lust, passion and violent death—is something which can never pene- trate this hushed, airless cell, or only at one remove, via reported speech.
But, if these marvellously involved and ornate reported speeches are the highlights of this pro- duction, there is one scene in which the tax- men's bleak routines are invaded by a kind of prickly, animal tension. This is the extraordin- ary first meeting between Morley and the lusci- ous, pea-brained tart whom, for tax purposes, he is to marry. A purely technical contract had been envisaged. But, as Morley moves from petulance (`She's to stay out of my kitchen ! ') to panic to hard, practical conditions, one has a curious sensation. Undertones of jealousy, an- tagonism, sexual rivalry give way to a provoca- tive bossiness ('If I catch you near Richard I'll tear your eyes out, they're lovely by the way, where do you get that delicious grey eyeshadow? No visitors. I assume you will want a television set'): until—though nothing has been explicitly stated—it is clear that we are watching a gradual transfer of interest, not to say affection, in short a love scene. This is a,classical device—witness the harsh bargains struck between hostile loveis in Restoration comedy—and one which works invariably on the stage.
And, as in all the very best comedies, retribu- tion strikes according to tradition in linguistic terms : Mr Chayefsky has a keen ear for the various forms of common cant, for the lush purple prose of Morley's hippie period as much as for the clipped banality of the Hemingway heroics which succeed it. :Take, for instance, the fate of the luckless Richard (`He's such a dim thing'), jilted and betrayed by Morley in favour of his lecherous bride. Driven by this diabolical pair—in the first flush of enthusiasm, Morley reappears as an enchanting presidential- style he-man, complete with gunman's lounge and Texan drawl—to do the decent thing, Richard drives out into the night to a lonely suicide; his epitaph, pronounced with radiant complacency by Morley, is suitably bathetic: `The homosexual community still regards his gesture with awe.'
But the trouble, I suspect, is not that the moral and ironic implications are too subtle. Nor is it simply dissatisfaction with the play's resolution in which money takes an allegorical revenge on Morley—admittedly this second half is a trifle mechanical, but then so are the endless reversals of, say, Volpone. If Mr. Chayefsky has failed to solve this problem, it still does not account for the play's curiously uneasy reception —a discomfort which has to do rather with the play's ambiguous attitude, part fascination, part revulsion, to its central subject-matter. For if, on one level, this is a celebration of the arcane delights of big business, on another it shows a monstrous world peopled with grotesques— Peter Dyneley's unctuous and flabby lawyer, Ian Hogg as a sinister, bullet-headed gargoyle in dark glasses, John Kane's Delaney, with his cramped walk, stringy neck and vicious, spas- modic giggle: creatures who have abjured the flesh in favour of the power, the intricacy and intoxicating glamour of money. And money is a subject in which it is not respectable to take an overt interest—let alone the voluptuous de- light of this extraordinary play.
Meanwhile, back to iron rations—on the one hand, your anodyne commercial article, on the other, your improving tract. Two kinds of punishment with which, we are unfortunately familiar. A Boston Story at the Duchess is an adaptation from Henry James which retains only a fairly trite plot in charge of a remarkably list- less cast; not worth crossing the road, save for a ravishing performance by Nicola Pagett as our heroine. Christopher Hampton's Total Eclipse at the Royal Court is an account—and I am in- debted to our business editor for the summary— of bow Verlaine passed four years, 1871-75, vainly chasing Rimbauds. This dreary tale has been approved on the grounds that it represents an honest, painstaking and instructive record of the poets' doings; and, in the very limited sense that the events recorded did, so far as is known, occur on or near the dates mentioned, the de- fence might be admitted if it were not for the fact that the patent falsity of our heroes' emotional crises is equalled only by the excruci- ating banality of their dialogue. We may safely deduce, therefore, that, whatever form these events may have taken, it could not have been this one; and that, whatever passed on these occasions, it was certainly not in the kind of stilted periods (Tye never been so humiliated in my life') seldom found outside women's mags and never on the human lip.
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