Theatre
I Spy
By ALAN BRIEN Hamlet. (Lyric, Hammer- smith.)—Look After Lulu. (Royal Court.)—Fine Fettle. (Palace.) Hamlet is a play about spies, a voyeurs' melodrama, in which all the characters eaves- drop on each other. Some- where in the barrel is a rotten apple which is infecting the rest. Each person sneaks on his neighbour, watching for the tell-tale wormhole which betrays the disease at the core. Evidence is continually being amassed. Samples are con- tinually being studied. Statements are continually being taken. Action hangs fire while doublets and hose are searched for matches. The central prov- ing point of the plot is the play scene where the fiction within a fiction precipitates the truth. The Youth Theatre Hamlet at Hammersmith has one of the best play scenes I have ever watched. The enthusiastic, untrained young actors have not the technique to upstage Shakespeare and so the text shines through their transparent pretensions like a blowlamp through a fishing net.
I understand the arthritis which seizes the feet of playgoers at the very sound of those two words, Amateur and Shakespeare. Theoretically, we are all in favour of the sort of production mounted by Michael Croft. It has no gimmicks, no stars, no surprises. But we cannot help feel- ing that almost anyone who has read the book of the film could take over some of the roles to advantage. The boys rant and rave and roll their eyes as if they were auditioning for the Comedic Francaise. Some of them behave as if they had turned up to sell programmes and been beaten on to the stage with rolled-up newspapers. And some of them have. Understudies take over at the drop of an aitch. Wigs, props, accents, gestures, readings vary from night to night and from minute to minute. But Shakespeare survives not despite the amateurishness but because of it. There is never a dull moment in Hammersmith— which is more than I can say for Stratford-upon- Avon and Waterloo Road.
Richard Hampton's Hamlet has many faults. He takes in more breath than he gives out. He speaks the soliloquies as if he were giving direc- tions over a railway station loudspeaker. When he comes to the front of the stage to unburden his soul he harangues us like a church parade. Yet he has an urgency, an awareness of an audi- ence, a directness which wakes them all up at the back there. He cannot conceal his knowledge that there is someone listening and so we do listen. The famous quotations sound new-minted on his lips. In the tetchy baiting of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he really seems irritated be- yond endurance at the probings of those two dull swots. During the mouthings of the player-king, he really seems concerned to discover what Claudius's reactions will be. It does not matter that Polonius is older than Ernest Thesiger, or that Ophelia is more washed out than any RADA gold medallist. The play's the thing and until the final curtain it is still doubtful what will happen next. Hamlet is a new, old play stripped of all the fancies of romantic critics, pared of all the tricks of romantic actors. The characters share our puzzlement about what is going on. The Youth Theatre production is a play about spies, acted by schoolboys: nothing more and nothing less. It is well worth a visit.
I like French farces and I like British farceurs. Neither is shown in the best limelight at the Royal Court or at the Palace. In Look After Lulu (soon to be transferred to the New Theatre), Mr. Noel Coward has sicklied over the geometrical ingenuities of Feydeau with a veneer of his own off-colour sophistication. This sort of sexual jig- saw puzzle should shine with the sterile twinkle of a scalpel in cellophane. Mr. Coward has blunted and fingermarked the whole thing by adding his own emetic mixture of bed-pan jocu- larity and dead-pan smartness. The director, Tony Richardson. has also fogged the polish of the original by encouraging a talented cast to over-act in half a dozen incongruously varied styles. The play now contains a sample of every comic method known to Shaftesbury Avenue from Rookery Nook grotesquery to Lonsdale archness. If you can last out a whole evening just for the sight of Vivien Leigh's knickers, you should gaze your fill on Look After Lulu. Almost everything in Fine Fettle is second-rate except Benny Hill himself. The sets are enormous and nasty. The dancing is pretentious and derivative. The writing is good-natured and pointless. Mr. Hill, a glazed moon-calf in search of a punch- line, wanders amiably through a dozen charac- ters without ever turning a grin into a belly- laugh.
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