Getting Married (Strand)
THEATRE
Playbore of the western world
IIILARY SPURLING
Three Sisters (Royal Court) Uproar in the House (Garrick) Spring Awakening (Bremen Theatre at the Aldwych) The Shaw revival thundering forward begins to look like a sinister parody of another triumphal progress—public adulation, critical acclaim, managements laughing all the way to the bank—which swept the West End some seventy years ago. Only then it was Pinero who was box-office gold, and Shaw who protested violently against his predictable plots and cheap, toadying sententiousness.
But, when Shaw in turn came to take over the society drama, he too understood—because he shared—the complacency, snobbery and superficiality of his public. He peoples the stage to their hearts' content with dummies labelled 'general,' bishop,"society matron,' humorous member of the lower classes'—and the stock types degenerated noticeably in his hands. Com- pare the greengrocer in Trelawny of the Wells with the same character plagiarised for Get- ting Married, and used, with none of Pinero's keen interest and pleasure in the ways of green- grocers, to make a trite social point. For, where Pinero trotted out the old, banal situa- tions with a top dressing of pseudo-Intellectual discussion, Shaw used the same hackneyed means to get the same result by a mechanical mirror effect: his Don Juan is a conventional bourgeois at heart, his sentimental English Rose an unscrupulous crook. In Getting Married, his bride is against marriage, his bishop for free love. 'In this way he conquered the public by the exquisite flattery of giving them the plays they really liked, while persuad- ing them that such appreciation was-only pos- sible to persons of great culture and intellectual appreciation.' Shaw's analysis of Pinero applies, than as now, to himself.
And with Getting Married, Shasta:4nm ikir- fected the flattering knack of being always three jumps behind the audience with the obvious crack, the predictable argument, the endless, inevitable plot reversals : the snob falls in love with the coal-merchant's wife, the feminist sidles off to get married, the divorcée turns into a doting wife, and so on to the foot of the cast list. Presumably it is this tick-tock regularity which constitutes, for those who stay with him, an hypnotic charm. And, for those who can't, makes Shaw death.
Frank Dunlop's production is built round three basic moves, with eleven chairs provided for those not moving to sit on. The pitch is ear- splitting throughout. And here there seems to have been some misunderstanding with Mr Dunlop, who evidently planned this as an open- air production to be watched through bino- culars from a long way off in a howling gale. Perhaps he got muddled when they told him the Strand. At any rate, it is all too Much for his distinguished cast whose acting, without excep- tion, is of a feckless crudity rarely seen in London nowadays.
William Gaskill's production of Three Sisters at the Royal Court is, by contrast, radiantly sharp and clear. And this in spite of the fact that Mr Gaskill has chosen to avoid the few points at which Chekhov allows a comic lightening of the mood, to concentrate on weariness, depression, and the sense of small- town vulgarity closing in from, the sunny drawing-room of Act 1, filled with yellow and white spring flowers, to the cold, grey river- side at the end. The impression of light and space comes partly from the delicacy of the acting throughout, partly from the supple shapeliness of the production. Take, for in- stance, Act 3 in the sisters' bedroom. After the nervous exhaustion of the last act, the fire off- stage comes as a necessary, violent explosion; but the very harshness of the setting—the doctor sodden and weeping in his cups, Andrey's -dishonesty, Natasha's cruelty—serves to bring out soft and subtle colours. Abd'Elkader Farrah's set—bleached wooden boards and the tooth crammed with vast, un- wieldy screens and closets—has. a comforting solidity. The sisters lie on their beds, retreat from one another and aditance, listen in silence, half-hidden, to their brother's diffident confes- sion. The whole has a luminous warmth and intimacy, and ends, with Irina sitting up in a glancing shaft of light, on the same note as Act 1, not so much coarsened as dimmed.
Marianne Faithfull's Irina, in fact, becomes the calm centre of this production, with a com- posure and a glowing emotional directness which few ingénues can manage. Round her revolve her two lovers—Roddy Maude-Roxby's patient Tusenbach and John Shepherd's Solyony, lurking shiftily in corners, drenching his clammy hands in scent. Some of the best moments come from the intricate relationship between these two—on the one hand, Solyony's isolation and his insane greed for IrMa; on the other, the gentleness with which Tusenbach soothes this nervy, squinting madman who will kill him in the end. This Tusenbach has the self-deprecating melancholy which comes of being ugly and inconspicuous; at the same time, a generosity and strength which give- his last parting from Irina—lingering on the edge of the garden in his ungainly overcoat for the passionate declaration she can't give him—a freezing desolation.
Indeed, this grim last act, with its sense of bleak farewells and fate a pinch-faced cheat, with Andrey creaking to and fro hunched over his flounced baby-cart and Chebutykin hum- ming sadly on the garden seat, is scarcely to be borne at all. George Cole's Andrey, Alan Webb's Chebutykin, Peter Russell's Kulygin are -scrupulous and sensitive performances: Glenda Jackson makes a brooding, feline, but oddly unforthcoming Masha; and Michael Gwynn, as Vershinin, has brilliantly captured his brisk charm over sentimentality and weak- ness. Only Avril Elgar, as Olga, is on too crabbed and mean a scale for Chekhov. If this production has not quite put on the ripe, musky bloom of Olivier's Uncle Vanya, it still sets the pace for his own Three Sisters in July at the Old Vic; and it will be interesting to see if Olivier allows any of the gaiety and bustle which Mr Gaskill so judiciously withholds.
Meanwhile, Brian Rix brings Uproar in the House, his second instalment of the Theatre of Laughter, which, like the first, would be funnier if ruder and cruder. The whole is a trifle too genteel. Still, a brilliant second half makes up for an expendable first, and I par- ticularly fancied Mr Rix plucking imaginary parsley behind his back with twitching fingers in an effort to get across some hopelessly trumped-up alibi to his suave accomplice (Elspet Gray). And Andrew Sachs, as the private- inquiry agent, routing out illicit couples, slop- ing in belted mac with furtive camera in and out the double bedrooms, -adds a whiff of vintage Graham Greene. This is a treasure fans mustn't miss.
Spring Awakening, by Frank Wedekind, is a distinctly gloomy tract on the need for sex instruction, treated, in this production by Peter Zadek, with considerable awe. Puberty is a hard subject to deal with on the stage, especi- ally when your juveniles already sprout dark beards, and in seeking successfully to avoid indelicacy this production also lets slip the delicate and subtle; not perhaps the best vehicle in which to judge the virtues of the Bremen company.
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