Arts
Osborne off the rails
Kenneth Hurren
Watch It Come Down by John Osborne; National Theatre Company (Old Vic) Old Flames by E. A. Whitehead (Arts Theatre Club)
Speaking with the tongues of men, and occasionally of angels, and having absolutely no charity, John Osborne's plays have often been, if not at their best, at least at their most interesting (The Entertainer, West of Suez) when the tinkling symbols of England and Empire have reverberated through them. I thus had highish hopes of his new one, which is one long, rampaging metaphor for our doomed civilisation: hopes, even, that the play in performance would iron out the confusions of the published text. The hopes are not, I'm sorry to say, realised; mostly, perhaps, because the characters are too insubstantial, too preposterous and too trivial for the weight of symbolism they have to bear. They are the denizens of Osborne's plastic lodge at the gates of `Heartbreak House'. It is a vacuum, and who cares if it does come down ?
Our concern is vainly invited for a group of trendyish refugees from urban living, holed up in a disused country railway station which has been recycled, as the vogue word is, in a style that hovers on the brink of taste. There's a Lowry on the wall, an ivory chess set as a throwaway, and all the 'right' reading matter in evidence: not that anyone ever reads or plays chess or looks at pictures. What they do, generally, is bitch and love in roughly equal proportions —displaying in the former much of Osborne's famously vivacious gift for waspish invective, and in the latter, as they slobber and kiss and find serenity in sex without regard for gender, his preoccupation with whimsy that goes right back to those cuddly toys in Look Back in Anger— until eventually their refuge crashes about their heads, destructively shot up by 'yobbos' who have been hired, it is hinted, by the neighbourhood gentry.
Ben, who owns this Beeching reject, is a disenchanted film director. 'How can you be an artist,' he asks plaintively, 'in a world that despises imagination and only gives instruction in orgasms ?'—which is a question, rhetorical or not, the premises of which seem somewhat hostile to rational analysis, but is a fair sample of the chat around the house. His old mother is upstairs with her television and her cats, uncaring of what passes for reality in this siding; she doesn't appear, but I strongly suspect that if she did she might be dressed as Britannia. His wife, Sally, to whom Osborne gives his sprightliest lines (she is played, curiously uneasily, by Jill Bennett) keeps up a rare barrage of taunts and insults to depress him—especially in regard to his former wife and his daughter, both of whom she describes as `runty'—when she is not sitting cosily with Raymond, one of the household's resident homosexuals, or with Jo, a girl so full of love that it spills like syrup over everyone. Jo stirs lust in Ben and in Sally. She loves them both ; but most of all she loves Glen, an ageing, ailing writer—or, in Sally's phrase, 'an academic old pouf' —whom 1 should have mentioned before, since he is there in some sense as the house's wilting Captain Shotover. Glen lies gently dying most of the evening, and misses the climactic debacle, having just expired quietly after finishing his last chronicle of the twentieth century.
Frank Finlay as Ben, disconsolately near the end of his strap even at the start, Susan Fleetwood as Jo, making a game stab at lines that might reduce any actress to tears and any audience to embarrassment, and, of course, Miss Bennett are the most prominent performers; but neither the acting nor Bill Bryden's production induces sympathy for this maudlin cultural commune or belief in its people. Only those who are somehow able to share Osborne's admiration for them, and perhaps also his contempt for 'the green belt of muddied, grasping, well-off peasants from public schools and merchant banks' as well as for 'the messianic miseries of metropolitan Albion' (his distastes, as ever, are engagingly catholic), will emerge from it all not strongly afflicted with apathy.
Among the wave of playwrights who have come in the wake of Osborne, E. A. Whitehead is making himself, as it were, the spokesman for the opposition in the matter of sex. This might be inadvertent; or it could be either out of deep conviction or determined simply by a shrewd deduction that there is less competition on the antisex side of the fence. Anyway, that's his position, as I see it, and in his latest piece, Old Flames, he lays it right on the line. It is not that he hates either men or women; he just deplores the heterosexual urge that leads to the ensnarement of men and the betrayal of women. For the man in his play, a slick, womanising salesman named Edward and played by Gary Bond, the
wages of sex is death ; literally. This climax is foreshadowed in the characteristicallY replusive drawing that Gerald Scarfe has done for the programme and the advertisements: a cuneiform caricature centred on an orifice voraciously equipped with a set of teeth. The women on hand, a vampirical sorority, confirm the image.
Edward's newest potential conquest, another Sally (Katherine Fahy), lives on a houseboat—mainly, she explains significantly (though the significance is lost on Edward), because she does not care to be dependent on the corporation dustmen for the disposal of refuse—and a diverting evening seems in prospect when she impishly confronts her would-be seducer with three of his cast-offs: two former wives (Judy Cornwell and Barbara Ewing) and his mother (Anne Dyson). She invites them all to the same dinner-party; but something more than Edward's discomfiture is in her mind. As far as he is concerned, it will be a dinner—as Hamlet said of Polonius—not where he eats but where he is eaten.
It might have been helpful to the tone and structure of the play if Whitehead had kept this revelation up his sleeve a bit longer, instead of blowing it at halfway; but he, too, has other things in his mind. Eschewing drollery in • a protracted anticlimax, he settles his women down and, with the temerity of a paraplegic discussing gymnastic techniques, presumes to allow them to describe their reactions to their sexual encounters with men. I'm not sure whether the ripples of female giggles that greeted nearly every lewd turn of phrase indicated ribald scepticism or warm endorsement of the authenticity of Whitehead's idea of girl-talk ; I can only saY that I felt the conversation might seem unusually indelicate if attributed to sailors on leave east of Sue7. What is clear, through the smokescreen of crudity, is that they all regard the congress of men and women as tiresomely overrated: one implies graphically that masturbation is more a game worth the candle, not to say the vibrator; another seems altogether more enthusiastic about lesbianism; another, on the whole, prefers grass; and the mother, though generally keeping mum during the gaudier exchanges, cannot demur from the consensus findings on the basis of the memory of her own disagreeable experiences. The evidence is strong that they are to be taken as Whitehead's spokespeople, but he did confuse me at the end when, in a parody of the Christian communion, and 'in memory of Edward', they each eat a token piece of his body and sip a little of his blood. It is almost as though they have been kidding all along in their sour view of Edward and his sex, and that really the?' thought him divine. The girls seem a bit bewildered, too, by this change of key; but I can congratulate them on carrying out.the ritual with proper solemnity and straight faces, and indeed on being four-letter perfect in their roles throughout.
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