ARTS Daft in the Orange manner
HILARY SPURLING
Congreve's The Double Dealer is set, in William Gaskill's production, designed by John Gunter at the Royal Court, in an elegantly panelled gallery, framed by heavy drapery and backed by a wall-painting in which a band of wiry satyrs seem to be not so much raping as climbing about on a number of florid, naked women con- siderably larger than themselves. Glimpses of bulging calf or thigh suggest further instalments of the mural through doorways to the right and left. But—the execution being somewhat clumsy and on far too grand a scale for this modest apartment— the effect is over-ambitious, and by no means as handsome or impressive as its fond owners must have hoped. Much the same might be said for the guests at Lord Touchwood's entertainment who, though vastly imposing to themselves, are rather less so to Jack Maskwell, Ned Careless, young Mellefont and the rest.
These supercilious youths (engaged mean- while in activities of their own quite as elaborate, strenuous, and on the whole as unsuccessful, as the satyrs') are not slow to cut their companions down to size. 'Where are the women? I'm weary of guzzling,' are Careless's first, characteristic lines; and the crispness of this opening scene—the arrogance of the two young men, Careless's slovenly insolence and Mellefont's politer version of the same self- satisfaction—are characteristic of Mr Gas- kill's Restoration manner (or rather, since Charles n had been dead eight years by the time the play was first performed, his Orange manner). For it was Mr Gaskill's
production of The Recruiting Of at the Old Vic in 1964 which first did away with the affected insipidity of 'Restoration style'; which demonstrated that the drama of this period has as little to do with Hazlitt's 'happy, careless age' or Lamb's artificial fairyland as with Macaulay's indignant vision of fecklessness and squalor; which showed, in short, what some half-dozen brilliant productions have since confirmed, that late seventeenth century comedy is an art of passionate and painful realism.
Not that there is anything particularly painful about Congreve's honesty in The Double Dealer; on the contrary, for this is the homeliest of his comedies, distinctly casual towards its central figures, most fetching in its absurdly accurate portraits of peripheral gulls and nitwits. Maskwell, for all his treachery, is scarcely a serious menace; one marvels less at the venom of his plots than at their ingenious elasticity. Cynthia and Mellefont—though they have that dangerous mildness, always a sign in Congreve of superior penetration—are not much exercised by his nefarious schemes, and their composure barely ruffled.
Congreve was twenty-four when he wrote the play, and it gleams with that exuberant, unassertive malice which is traditionally the first phase with English comic writers: a gaiety unshadowed by the harsher impli- cations of a later stage in which, as the risks are fiercer, so the rewards are greater and the punishments more frightful—one has only to think of Scandal gloating over that atrocious marriage, at the end of Love for Love: 'Tattle and Frail—linked for
eternity!' or, for that matter, of Mrs Norris and her niece Maria banished to 'another country—remote and private, where, shut up together with little society, on one side no affection, on the other, no
judgment, it may be reasonably supposed that their tempers became their mutual punishment.' If Love for Love has some- thing of the bitterness of Mansfield Park, then The Double Dealer is Congreve's Love and Freindship, where he does no more than survey the world in singularly high spirits.
The play contains what must be two of the most enchanting vignettes of marriage in the language: the appalling Froths, doting on themselves and one another with an admiration as fervent as it is im- probable; and the doleful Plyants—Sir Paul wrapped nightly in a bed sheet and unable to so much as dab a finger at his invincibly chaste spouse, whose edicts he endures ('I acquiesce, my lady; but don't snub so loud') with an imploring meek- ness pitiful to watch. George Howe makes an admirable crushed worm, but Alison Leggatt is less happy as his lady. Geoffrey Chater's Lord Froth—whose sole claim to wit is that he never laughs, and who speaks, indeed cackles alarmingly, through lips snapped tightly shut—is a delectable creation; Gillian Martell's plump and placid, blandly immodest Lady Froth is another. The scene in which she and the 'pert coxcomb', Brisk (Malcolm Tierney) dis- cover a mutual passion in fits of giggles is one of the best things in this production: nervous laughter seems the only possible reaction to a match between two such de- plorably unprepossessing creatures.
If Cynthia and Mellefont (played by Celia Bannerman and Michael Byrne) seem shadowy by comparison, their reticence is the more necessary when other people's private business—Sir Paul expounding his marital tribulations to all corners. Lady Froth exhibiting her daughter Sappho ('poor little Saph'), fetched six times in one day to be admired at the hall door--is so embarrassingly public. Watch Brisk's dis- may when he consults a pocket-glass ('Deuce take me, I've encouraged a pimple here.') and the masterly sang-froid with which Lord Froth takes charge ('Then you must mortify him with a patch; my wife shall supply you') of what might otherwise have been a nasty crisis.
In contrast to such grave and urgent matters, Maskwell—busily engaged, in an- other part of the forest, on abduction, dis- inheritance, at least two kinds of incest, finally baring his breast for Lady Touch- wood's dagger--seems daft in quite a differ- ent sense. And yet John Castle's villain, with his sensual red lips, heavy jowls, fruity voice and imperturbable discretion, lends a kind of plausibility. and an unden- iable relish, even to these ludicrous, Italianate doings. It is only with Judy Par- fitt's shrill and spiteful Lady Touchwood that the production come close to parodying itself. But. if Congreve is hoist with his own plot-strings in Acts 4 and 5—which, unlike Saygrace's text, are neither short, pithy nor handled with discretion—it is a small price to pay for so much pleasure
by the way. And anyone who has the patience to sit through to the unmasking— 'Thou wonder of all falsehood!' Art thou silent, monster!' 'Secure that manifold villain!'—will be amply rewarded when Brisk draws his conclusion: 'Well, this is all very surprising. let me perish!'
And so to Antony and Cleopatra, dir- ected by Peter Dews at Chichester: this is an eminently sound and serviceable pro- duction, in what we may call 'fifties utility style, marred only by a literal-mindedness —all armies, for example, wear regulation leather goods (not surprisingly unscathed in a number of distinctly phoney battles).— which has become already more than a trifle mannered. Michael Aldridge makes a mag- nificent Enobarbus, and Keith Baxter a remarkably convincing, gauche and uneasy Caesar, looking uncannily like the statues of Augustus when young. John Clements' Antony, like his Macbeth, is a formidable military man, best in scenes of action and masculine camaraderie, and best of all as the 'old ruffian' at the end; the drinking scene on hoard Pompey's flagship is par- ticularly fine. Margaret Leighton's Cleo- patra is a splendid creature: tall. danger- ous, willowy, with a peculiar indolence in anger or impatience -as when, stalking imperiously into the Egyptian sunlight, she petulantly swats a fly. This is a taut and subtle Cleopatra. and brilliantly regal in her sombre final scenes.
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