THEATRE
Puzzly puzzle
HILARY -SPURLING The True History of Squire Jonathan and his Unfortunate Treasure (Ambiance, Queensway) The Real Inspector Hound (Criterion) My Giddy Aunt (Savoy) Supposing you were induced to attend' a premiere in a cellar and supposing that, on arrival, you were confronted by a row of dinky, crenellated, turret-style brickettes complete with chain and three-pronged drawbridge, the whole looking remarkably like one of those stout wooden construction kits purveyed by highbrow toyshops—supposing all this, which promising British playwright would instantly leap to mind? It could be none other than John Arden. and the play's ponderous humour and childlike story line would confirm your guess.
Suppose, on the other hand, that you were led to a prominent West End theatre celebrated for brisk, cheerful and mildly salacious entertain- ment, to witness this time a slight but ingenious farce by a young author deservedly respected, among commercial backers, for his swift rise to fame. In which case you would no doubt name Tom Stoppard. Lastly, name another play- wright, equally glib and undemanding. also with a first night last week, and the answer is Ray Cooney.
Of this trio, Mr Cooney is the odd man out since he has not so far been promoted by the National Theatre. The other two are members of that select band of new, native playwrights included in the NT'S repertoire. A third is Peter Shaffer, who, like Mr Cooney, a dab hand at a farce; and who. like Mr Stoppard, moved via the NT to Broadway. Not that anyone could object to that. On the con- trary. The only puzzle is what either of them was doing at the rsrr in the first place.
Which brings us to last week's remaining first night, Triple Bill, at the Old Vic. Two rightly neglected, antique curtain-raisers Inve been dug cut, and given more or less undistinguished per- formances, for the sake of another new play- wright, John Lennon's In His Own Write. The production suggests the same smug. facile and perilously self-indulgent banality we have come to expect in the way of new plays from this company. Considering the precarious state of the theatre at large, it is depressing. Even more depressing is the reasoning behind the policy. Since the management has no pressing financial need to curry favour with the public, we must take it that someone at the NT has a genuine taste for this kind of pap.
In His Own Write deals with the experiences at work and play of a satirical second war tot (Police don't garryon like this my son, tell Muddle werts the metre ... My Golf! Norman wit are yuo torking about turn?' My sympathies lay with mother. Wit indeed?) The general effect is something like an infant Private Eye, com- posed in retaliation against a heavy diet of Listen with Mother or whatever was the war- time equivalent—Uncle Mac, I seem to recall. But the kind of crack—about Fieldimarcher Loud Mount Gammery or the Nasties booming overhead—which must have seemed pretty sharp at the time, palls rather fast when acted out in public by grown men. Our hero, for in- stance, retires with a comic to read the latest cliff-hanging instalment of his adventure strip: 'All too soon they reached a cleaner in the jumble and set up cramp.' Enter a cleaner cleaning and retreats, doubled up with cramp.
If the text, in its own right so to speak, takes one back to the pre-adolescent world, this em- barrassingly sentimental production recalls all too clearly the attempts of coy and unctuous adults to patronise that world. An effect due partly to Victor Spinetti's direction, partly to the adaptation, by Adrienne Kennedy, which makes unerringly for the weakest sections of Mr Lennon's two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. The babytalk poems bulk large, for instance, intoned with winsome relish by Ronald Pickup as our hero: I have a little budgie He is my very pal I take him walks in Britain I hope I always shall
Anything touching remotely on the adult world has been removed. Thus, Sir Alice Doubtless- Whom, Joke Grimmace (LIB) and the rest do not figure in this production; Enoch Bowel rates a mention but the spoof Cassandra column —which, being evidently based on cordial de- testation, is by far the funniest, subtlest and most savagely -accurate piece in either book— is not included.
The production itself is both inept and curi- ously old-fashioned. The Shakespeare skit, for instance, the sermon, the television interviews and the rambling working man, are all sadly crude reproductions of sketches which origin- ated seven years ago in Beyond the Fringe. Since then, the style has been developed with considerable sophistication and inventiveness by TWTWTW, the Eye and Round the Horne, to name but three; odd that Mr Spinetti should have missed them all. Of the company, only
Kenneth Mackintosh stands up with any con- fidence to the more punishing parts of Mr Lennon's text.
`Puzzly puzzle, wonder why . . .' as our baffled hero put it, when he mistook a tiny little tiny pig for a winged but hiddy lady. Still, this latest offering will no doubt prove, like all the other brr new playwrights, a shrewd choice in one sense at least. All, that is, save John Arden who is not, and on present showing never will be, fashionable. Not so much for any intrinsic complexity in his plays, rather for a kind of lumpiness which is glaringly at odds with the smooth workers currently preferred. Squire Jonathan is no exception : the squire clumps about his turret, menaced by a pair of unlikely black woodcutters and yearning for a great white horsewoman who finally falls through the curtain with a resounding thud. The main point of this somewhat pointless fairy tale seems to be to watch her strip; but, since the damsel in question is reassuringly maternal and as a stripper more resolute than skilled, the effect is chastening rather than the oppo- site, and one can well understand when the squire takes fright—though not for quite the reasons mentioned in Mr Arden's text.
Mr Stoppard's Real Inspector Hound is the pick of this week's bunch: a neat joke at the expense of two bumbling theatre critics, played with immense panache by Ronnie Barker and Richard Briers. One's only quibble is that Mr Stoppard's views on critics should be so dull and, considering the pomposity, spite, stupidity, ill-nature and conceit regularly vented in this column and elsewhere by members of the trade, too amiable by half. The reviews no doubt afforded him a certain sardonic amusement; the management might consider replacing their present curtain-raiser with a- rather snappier number, consisting of a selection of the notices read aloud with appropriate intonations by their able cast.
Still, as with the earlier Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, one must forgive the trite de- velopment for the brilliant originality of the idea; if Mr Stoppard and Mr Cooney—whose ideas are conventional in the extreme but whose execution in, for instance, Not Now Darling
at the Strand, is infinitely accomplished—would get together, a merger might produce spectacu-
lar results. But Mr Cooney, with his colleague John Chapman, has done his worst this week at the Savoy; on present form we are lucky, I dare say, that this cheap and shoddy piece of work didn't catch the brr's fancy.
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