29 OCTOBER 1977, Page 26

Theatre

Vivid

Ted Whitehead

Skoolplay (Theatre Upstairs) Metamorphosis (Cottesios)

The Lady from Maxim's (Lyttelton) For Alan Brown, Skoolplay is an unusually restrained and gentle study of family life. Nobody is murdered, burnt, raped, buggered or even castrated. Admittedly, the household is a bit odd. The father (Richard Henry) spends most of his time knitting a balaclava and mouthing imprecations at the rest of the family. The mother (Joan Geary) dismisses him as a smelly pig and obviously has the hots for her thirtyfive-year-old son, Gilbert (Dave Hill). But he already has his hands full with his mousy, pathetic sweetheart (Susan Porrett), and with a strange blonde nature girl, Rower (Chloe Salaman); and really he seems to prefer the solitude of his bedroom, a black cell with a barred window and with portraits of Freud, Marx, Nietzsche and Gilbert him' self. The dialogue alternates threats, insults and maudlin sentiments, and there are MO' ical interruptions courtesy of Beethoven, Wagner and Satie. Throughout the piece Grandad (Leslie Pitt) sits by the stove in the rubbish-filled lounge, wearing sunglasses, a white flannel suit and a panama hat beneath which lies a dead rat (courtesy of Marie Chew); periodically he intones verses from Eliot, 'I think we are in rats' alley, Where the dead men lost their bones.' At the end the others go off to see Gilbert starring in a play at the school where is is employed as a janitor, leaving Grandad alone with Flower, to whom he addresses his sole original line of dialogue: 'Show me a tit.' And she does, and the old man is happy.

Is it the air of the Mersey that makes sn many Liverpool writers come on like flame-throwers? Recent plays by Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell, for example, show the same joy in anarchic insult and the same talent for comic nihilism. What particularly impresses me about Alan Brown is that he is a brilliant naturalist using a surreal form that enables him to yank together in one play elements normally kept conveniently separated. What's Eliot, or Beethoven, to these impoverished and degraded characters, and what are these characters to them? What are these notions of propriety — of purity, and love, and religion — that keep popping up in this violent, sex-charged environment? The questions recur in the equally hilarious but much more savage film Brown Ale with Genie (a send-up of Cider with Rosie) written and directed by Alan Brown, which was shown after the interval. (Calder have published the film-script together with others scriPts by Brown and are to publish his first novel next year.) It's good to see the Court providing a platform for such an exciting young writer (he's twenty-six), even if the production was done on a shoestring and given only a few performances. The play was designed by Rodger Parker, and directed by Ian Kellgren, who confirmed the vivid talent shown in his recent production of The Winter Dancers.

The fringe theatre do a heroic job in presenting new plays, but what a pity it is that there are so few venues in which such new work could have the opportunity of a run. I'm glad therefore that Metamorphosis, which returned briefly to the Cottesloe, is soon to be presented at the New London. Steven Berkoff's adaptation of the Kafka story is an extraordinary example of total theatre, a fusion of speech and movement with special sound effects by Paul Burwell, lighting by John Gorringe and -electronic effects by Paul Kendal to create an overwhelming dramatic impact. And I do mean dramatic, and not simply theatrical — because though your ears ring and your eyes sting, it's your imagination that is enthralled: Terry J. McGinity turned into a beetle right there in front of us. His skill at creating the helpless crawly was aided by the horrified but guilty reactions of his family, played by Stephen Williams, Maggie Jordan and Mary Rutherford, and of the lodger, Wolf Kehler. The family comes Pretty badly out of this play too, as father, mother and sister cheerfully exploit the son as breadwinner. Male Lib — or is it Son's Lib?

The programme at the National is very nicely balanced at the moment, with George Feydeau's The Lady from Maxim's in the Lyttelton theatre. John Mortimer has brought off a delightfully racy and idiomatic translation of this essentially French farce, in which a bourgeois doctor is landed with a cocotte and obliged to try and pass her off as his wife in provincial society. When the real wife appears, she has to be Passed off as his friend's wife. And when the friend. . .but let's just say that every solution leads remorselessly to even more bewildering complexities. I had a fit of the giggles for most of the evening, particularly at the sight of Stephen Moore's panicstricken doctor and Michael Bryant's booming general.

As for Sara Kestelman, she hardly merited her description as an 'old boiler' but convinced me of her religious mania, while Morag Hood cocked a leg in great style as the cocotte, and Harry Lomax, as the butler, won a lot of laughs just by looking White and exhausted, as well he might. Christopher Morahan, the director, marshalled his enormous cast with considerable verve and clarity. It is one of the funniest Shows I have seen in years, yet underneath it, if you care to look, you can see Feydeau's contempt for bourgeois marriage and morality and his affection for the godless vitality Of the Lady from Maxim's.