Subsidence
THEATRE HILARY SPURLING
Those who, a few years ago, wrote bitterly to the papers complaining of filth, bold doings and danger afoot in the serious theatre, may care to look about them again today. For, if the past year has done anything, it has proved by default that stiff competition from the powerful sub- sidised sector is essential to the health and spirits of the theatre at large. It is getting on for two years now since the National Theatre last gave us a revolutionary or even a particu- larly original production; far longer than that since we had grounds for expecting any new impetus from either the Royal Shakespeare Company or the Royal Court; and the results are plain for all to see in this year's sorry record
A of flopping and floundering in the West End. (0,..% Reasons for this loss of direction are not far to seek. The theatre, more than any other art, lives on the present, responding most sensitively and immediately to the lightest of passing whims; and our three leading companies are run by a generation (or by its immediate followers) which stamped itself so firmly on the 'fifties that it is no wonder if their ideas have since become a trifle fixed, if they have found it hard to adjust to the passage of time. The fact .remains that none has so far shown signs of much more than a nodding acquaintance with the world we live in, let alone of an eye to the future.
Not that the outlook has been wholly black. On the contrary : we have seen this year an im- pressive list of visiting companies beginning with the World Theatre Season at the Aldwych, perhaps Mr Daubeny's most brilliant to date —remember the Nob Theatre of Japan, the Comedie Francaise in Marivaux, the Greek Art Theatre (which has already born fruit in Karo- los Koun's entrancing Romeo and Juliet at Stratford) and the Piccolo Theatre of Milan; beside these we may set, through the good offices of the Royal Court and the International Theatre Club, productions from The Open Theatre and the La Mama companies from off- off Broadway. All, including the longueurs, to the good. Add to these a series of uncommonly fine revivals—half a dozen Shakespeares, four of them impeccable, from the RSC; handsome reparation done to Vanbrugh (The Relapse, Rsc) and the great Thomas Otway (The Soldier's Fortune, Royal Court). The Royal Court also contributed a shining Three Sisters, followed by a notably inferior production at the Old Vic —and here we may note in passing that the NT has twice this year brought up the rear with productions which scarely improved on their forerunners : as Lady Bracknell might have 1: -laid, to do this once may be regarded as a misfortune; twice looks like carelessness.
The Nr, in fact, has slipped this year, with
a succession of more or less ill-advised and, judged by its own uncompromising standards, unsuccessful productions; showing at the same time a new and alarming tendency to rely on directors—Glen Byam Shaw, Tyrone Guthrie— whose styles evolved long ago and have fossilised since. And the yr's Strindberg, like the Rsc's Ibsen, proved what might perhaps have been suspected—that if there is one decade in which it is unwise to attempt the nineteenth century Scandinavians, in which their faults seem most tawdry, their virtues least attractive, it is this one. Odder still, especially from the NT, is their failure to acknowledge Pirandello's centenary. Three Pirandellos are promised when the Italian Compagnia dei Giovani return to the Aldwych in 1969; in the meantime our own companies continue to ignore a playwright who, of all others, has dealt most fiercely and subtly with problems peculiar to the twentieth century.
Which brings us to the whole painful ques- tion of new plays. We are the poorer this year for the deaths of Joe Orton and Giles Cooper, two of a minute band of dramatists who had both ambition and the intelligence and imagina- tion to sustain it. The Royal Court put _out a couple of Orton's, a sporadically entertaining pair by Charles Wood, otherwise a mixed bag of which the less said the better; the same applies to the RSC'S more pretentious but equally super7 ficial attempts to keep up with the times. The Nr's most successful production was Tom Stop- pard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and it is no fault of the playwright's if this company chooses to take up what is essentially a com- fortably undemanding commercial piece, and has since, very properly, become one of the few undoubted hits of the season on Broadway.
Why this diffidence, this reluctance to experi- ment or take risks, this readiness to put up with the second-rate, the facile or vulgar, often enough with downright drivel? Even supposing that no plays worth the name are being written in this country, there is still the world to choose from. One can only conclude, on the evidence of their past discoveries, that all three companies confine their researches 'to a some- what restricted market. All three, given a slight shift of emphasis, apparently still subscribe to a set of views canvassed in the turbulent 'fifties —or, come to that, the 'thirties: `Sing me a song of social significance Or you can sing till you're blue.
Let meaning shine From every line
Or ! won't love you.
Sing me of wars and sing me of breadlines, Tell me of front page news, Sing me of strikes and last minute headlines . .
Mr Tynan's very words, frequently repeated in the past two years, echoed in spirit if not to the letter by Mr Brook, Mr Hall, Mr Gaskill, and a message in itself by no means to be sneezed at.
But the results—the new plays put on—sug- gest a spirit at best unambitious and uncritical, at worst infinitely gullible. The Mermaid, the Hampstead Theatre Club, the London Traverse, the dreaded West End itself have been more adventurous in 1967. For 1968 we are promised Shakespeare adapted by Brecht, Seneca by Ted Hughes (both NT) and Aeschylus by Robert Lowell (Rsc): one may greet this as a tentative opening of windows—but whether any further or long-term prospect will emerge beyond the windows remains to be seen.
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