Theatre
Patriarchal
Ted Whitehead
The Madras House (Olivier)
I can understand why many people call The Madras House a masterpiece. Written by Harley Granville Barker in 1910, it is one of the first plays to ascribe female fallalery not to innate psychology, but to the social and economic system of patriarchy, which reduces the middle-class woman to a life of genteel futility and the working-class woman to one of sweated labour.
The first act is a leisurely examination of the futility. It's set in a comfortable bourgeois house in Denmark Hill, where the six Huxtable daughters of a formidable mother and prim father enjoy their prison while awaiting the release of marriage. Barker has great fun with the banalities of their chat. To visitors: 'You can see the Crystal Palace from the window !' In refer- ence to an unreliable suitor: 'One ought not to risk being unhappy for life!' Their aunt is no wiser; assessing her relationship with the husband who fled thirty years earlier, she says: 'I am his wife still, I hope.' Nor for that matter are the males. A visiting Philistine says: 'I got most of my reading done early.' The father passes judgment on an illicit sexual liaison: 'One must punish the guilty as well as the innocent — I'm all for that.'
I'd better refrain from quoting because the play is chock-a-block with deliciously dry lines. Anyway, the second act makes some very sour comments about the institution of marriage which, it seems, has been provided by Providence to prevent people from doing what they want to do. A young woman defies the moralists and insists on her rights to have a baby without the benefit of clergy, declaring that she will simply call the child her nephew, as the Roman popes used to do. And Barker makes It clear that he regards the difficulties in male-female rela- tionships as springing from the bizarre divi- sion of labour in society.
The third act is astonishingly prophetic. Madras pPre has returned from Arabia to negotiate the sale of his fashion business ('The Madras House') to an American businessman. He shows his disdain for commerce by agreeing to the American's offer in a couple of sentences and then pro- ceeds to discuss the much more interesting subject of the role of women. As a convert to Mohammedanism, he is disgusted by the corseted morality of Edwardian England and by the incipient freedoms of 'the new woman.' The American conversely wel- comes the woman's movement because it will lead to new markets for capital invest- ment — in other words, the new woman will have more money to spend on fashion, which he will supply. As they talk, a parade
of ludicrously attired ,models sways and minces around the room. And poor old Huxtable voices his bewilderment as what he has always taken to be the 'natural' con- dition of womanhood begins to crumble before his eyes.
Barker is demonstrating how the his- torical forces, both social and economic, which had earlier condemned women to the role of either pathetically redundant gentlewoman or industrial serf, were now forcing women into new roles that would be both liberating and oppressive in new ways. From now on, women would be used to sell. Once that crucial step is taken, it's only a short jump to the television age with Venus flogging cigars and Adonis flogging scour- ing powder; or, given the breaking of the sex taboos, to Penthouse and Deep Throat. We are still working through the con- tradictions and confusions following that liberation; and though the woman is no longer chained to the house, she is till chained to the child.
The final act shows 'Madras's horror at the continued devotion of his long- abandoned wife, and the determination of his son to carve out with his wife a way of life that will be socially useful and personally enriching despite the stifling conventions of the time.
Each of the four acts ushers in the next, but is otherwise virtually an independent piece. It's like looking through four win- dows into the same Edwardian prison. There's no organic growth in the drama, and this, I think, is due to the fact that Barker's attention is focused not on the characters and their interaction but on the conventions they represent. His interest is in moral and economic ideas. The result is that the play stimulates the mind but hardly ever engages the emotions (unless you count moral indignation as an emotion).
William Gaskill's production unfor- tunately strengthens the abstract feeling. Hayden Griffin's sets are physical enough and no doubt accurate in every detail. but this is not a play about the oppressiveness of furniture. Deliberately, no doubt, Gaskill is inviting us to assess four beautifully enamelled portraits rather than to become involved in a flesh-and-blood drama. But the low temperature drops even lower.
The performances are extremely erratic, with two unbearable caricatures, and with an exotic interpretation of Madras by 'Paul Scofield, who presents him as an Arab act: ing European rather than a European act- ing Arab. But Dinah Stabb blazes as the defiantly independent Miss Yates, Joss Ackland is excellent as the American, and Paul Rogers is affecting as old Huxtable, clinging to his crumbling certainties and vis- ibly flinching from the impact of the scan- dalous new ideas that are flying around. 'You are all idolaters of women and they are the slaves of your idolatry.' Is the notion obsolete? I'm afraid the Mohammedan chauvinist, the Edwardian patriarch, and the female champions of female depen- dence are still alive and thriving.
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