Theatre
Harrowing
Peter Jenkins
Savage Amusement (R.S.C., Warehouse) Monsieur Artaud (Theatre Space) Three middle class drop outs are sharing a squat with a nineteen-year-old working class reject. The place is inner Manchester, the time 1982. 011y is an anthropology graduate; once he visited Brazil although only, according to Hazel, to carry the bags of a TV film crew. Hazel is his wife; Daddy sends her a monthly cheque and her field is seventeenth century Spanish literature. Neither is able to obtain a university position. It is 'the cuts.' Ali has fled from a more politically committed family: her social conscience was too strong for their reformism; she has become a kind of latter day lady of the lamp in darkest Hulme. They all three live off Hazel's remittance (Daddy is a bank manager) and the proceeds of Fitz's daily shop-lifting activities. Fitz is a gangling youth born to the jungle of the inner city; he
goes to work in an ungainly outsize great coat within which he conceals a big stick.
Squatting in Rusholme they are but relatively deprived. Hulme is worse. Hulme is the Lower Depths, Ali, taking Hazel visits a problem family there. There is nothing to be done about Hulme but 'pull it all down and start again.' But the blight of the city is spreading; life is deteriorating in Rusholme, the Tesco is going to close and deprive Fitz of his best hunting and the West Indians next door, perpetually drumming, know of a better squat and are going to it; 'dossers, pissheads and fucking loonies' move in. Life in 1982 is not dramatically different to life now, simply worse; empty properties are smashed to deny them to squatters, social security rules are more stringent and law and order is in the hands of vigilante gangs. It becomes too much for Hazel who goes back to Mummy and Daddy leaving Oily to the fate he has willed — pauperisation, the real thing; he and Fitz, more equal now, remember better days like old men reminiscing in bleak and lonely bus shelters.
Savage Amusement is a powerful and disturbing piece of work. It is a play about hating the poor, about the nature of exploitation and the limits of politics. Peter Flannery founds it on conventional, and aggravating, left-wing assumptions such as that an Englishman's squat is his castle and the inalienable right of anthropology graduates to university positions. We are invited to believe that the television company which took 011y to Brazil staged, for savage amusement only, a battle to the _ death between rival tribes of primitive Indians. That's capitalism; hence Huhn&
But unlike so many of our politicallymotivated young theatre writers Flannery, although starting with the same class obsession and narrowness of focus, soars high above the level of agitprop. His three drop outs, one comes to realise, are in a colonial relationship with Fitz. Oily is like an enlightened and progressive district officer, gone native; Hazel yearns secretly for the old country; Ali is the missionary: they share their wretched landspace with Fitz and yet he remains their native servant, fetching and hunting for them, until civilised life itself breaks down and he becomes the Admirable Crighton, the indispensible one, unfitted by society but the fittest to survive it.
This is a despairing play. Political action, in the form of Al's brother who comes to take her home, is rejected. Ali returns to live among them in the Lower Depths; that, it seems, is all that can be done for the poor. Presumably the implication is that the whole of society, like Hulme, needs to be pulled down and started again, that the inner city is the core of a rotten apple, but the point is not made explicit; rather it is Flannery's ambiguity which gives disturbing force to his reminder that poverty has to be a moral question before it can become a political one.
As always with the RSC the acting is of the highest standard. David Threlfall makes a noble yobo of Fitz, catching him tenderly but without sentimentality. Lesley Manville manages to create around the scrubberish person of Ali an aura of inner strength, the stuff of saintliness, without the vulgarity of a halo. But everyone is good under Chris Dyer's tough-minded direction and the production makes harrowing use of city noises and nervy rock music. I was glad to have caught up with Savage Amusement. It is to continue in the RSC's repertory and should be seen.
Antonin Artaud, apostle of the theatre of cruelty, possessed most of the qualifications for twentieth century canonisation. That is to say he was a failure who, addicted to drugs, was confined to an asylum where he was tortured by electricity. His madness, as far as it concerned the theatre, lay in his endeavour to escape from it into something else, into a theatre transcending language, of total involvement achieved by gesture and language. It was a theatre of cruelty not because it depicted cruelty but because the experience of the audience was to be cruel, like analysis. Who better, I thought, to portray the man and his ideas than a travelling group called the Artaud Company which is currently enjoying the hospitality offered by Theatre Space, a friendly Covent Garden cellar, to travelling provincial companies? I was wrong. Everything was bad about Monsieur Artaud but worst of all its failure to pay any kind of ,homage to the teachings or the sufferings of the patron saint. Instead he was presented as a histrionic r i o whose ham, rie ,
more of a charlatan than some one own life was, in Martin Esslin's
words, 'the perfect tragedy, perfectly enacted.' Instead we had a perfect travesty, abominably enacted.
Previous page
