Contemporary Arts
A CRITIC'S farewell to his free theatre tickets is a melancholy business. However, I do not propose to dwell upon that side of my abandoning this column to its (doubtless happier) fate. Only, since this is the last fling, I hope my readers will forgive my being a little discursive. In brief, I shall not talk very much about the year's theatre. The title is there on the top for the sake of uniformity, but there is this to it : either you have seen the plays put on during the past year (in which case having me writing about them once again will be unbearable) or else you have not (in which case having me write about them at all will be insupportable). This dilemma is called the Pont des A nes or Hobson's choice, and it is one that continually besets, mucks up and destroys theatre critics. To summarise or not to summarise, that is the question. However, for the sake of the record I will tell you that this year I have liked John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. That I think the Royal Court Theatre is doing a good job of repertory and should be supported. That the most exciting thing was the visit of the Berliner Ensemble, for which we all owe a considerable debt to Mr. Daubeney—and I am not given to hand- ing out bouquets to impresarios, whom, in a general way, I regard as parasitical. That Arthur Miller is a better playwright when he is writing about modern times, but that he should resist all temptation to turn one-act plays into two acts in future. That John Clements has supplied a felt want with his modern repertory at the Saville. That the London theatre has been looking up this year. That I hardly dare say so, because, as usual, those connected with it have been the first to congratulate themselves on this phenomenon.
These, then, are the particular assertions I have to make about the theatre. More generally, I should say that the peril of a descent into a sub-cultural level of activity seems to me to be still lurking in the back- ground, and that this is the more serious in that, as a vehicle of entertainment pure and simple, the London stage is still in the horse- and-buggy era. Managers are deceiving them- selves if they think that the stage thriller, with its laborious pistol-shots, can ever again rival the machine-guns of a more spacious medium. Where Elizabethan audiences thronged to tragedies of revenge, we moderns make do with cowboy films, which are, indeed, the nearest equivalent—the only real convention of revenge existing in fictitious form today. Perhaps the stage in this country has to be determinedly highbrow or die out. Perhaps. indeed, it is dying out as a medium of mass entertainment. Finished the musicals, the awful light comedies spoken in Kensington accents against festival furniture, the low-life farces about being in the army/navy/air force! Ended the interminable drooling about the show going on and famous actresses being brave! Bankrupt the big combines! Universal darkness covering Shaftesbury Avenue and backer calling to backer across empty stages!
ANTHONY HARTLEY
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