2 JUNE 1967, Page 23

Horizontal Hold (Comedy)

THEATRE

At the follies

HILARY SPURLING

Intrigues and Amours (Theatre Royal, Stratford, East) The Trial. (Theatre on the Balustrade at the Aldwych) .

Two comedies this week, both on the fringes of fashionable London, the middle class with time and money to spare and a constant supply of tobacco, hard drink, smart chat about sex, marriage and where to look 'when they come blunt out with a nasty thing at a play.' 'For my part, I always take the occasion to blow my nose,' says Belinda—`you must blow your nose half off, then, at some plays,' says Lady Brute.

Stanley Price's new play, Horizontal Hold, is a divertimento on Vanbrugh's theme in The Provok'd Wife: 'what cloying meat is love, when matrimony's the sauce to't. Plot, machinery and the brash social background are pretty well identical in both plays, with the same lewd and liverish undertones, the same sexual and marital taboos cropping up for the same tame conclusion. Mr Price's provoked wife is a Tv pundit on sex, his Lady Fancyful a popular lady novelist—gushing, predatory, hard as nails and played by Moira Redmond in chiffon and a garish plastic mac. Constant and Heartfree turn up again, no longer improvident younger sons, here fitted out with jobs in ry and publishing, but still the same smooth- working gallants, unscrupulous, idle and bland. Mr Price's cast list, in short, is a duplicate of Vanbrugh's, down to its rabble of servants and hangers-on—journalist, photographer, even a grim, belted nanny who travels nowhere without a poker in her luggage, and not forgetting the invisible man with a mackintosh fetish who rings up to put filthy suggestions to the ladies one by one as they answer the phone. Best of all when Charles Muspratt, our amiable Heartfree (played by Richard Leech)%taktIS the call,, listens 3,114,,1i,e Cuut X111Vvelf

attentively, and says, with the air of one taking time off amid troubles of his own to be helpful to a stranger, 'Why don't you do that, then? Raincoat and all?'

Admittedly the play is timid, predictable, not 'o'ercharged with either plot or wit.' But what is agreeable about this kind of comedy are its inci- dental pleasures—the general raffishness, the hopeless contretemps, the occasional brilliant crack. And here Mr Price has an edge over Vanbrugh, giving us Holland Park now instead of Spring Gardens in 1697. This is life as we know it, dirty phone calls and all, in the glossy two-television-set household, littered with the latest books, the latest views and a distinctly vulgar taste in interior decoration (set by Brian Currah). Derek Godfrey plays the grumpy hus- band with great restraint .and charm; Yvonne Mitchell gives a delicate if somewhat repetitive performance as. his mildly flirtatious, deeply conventional wife; and Mr Price himself directs a production which could do with a few more weeks' rehearsal.

Where Vanbrugh has the advantage, of course, is in acuteness and malice. Not that there is noticeably less hypocrisy, snobbery and greed abroad in London today, but our play- wrights have as yet no convenient, conven- tional framework in which to set them off— for here plot and wit are one, inextricably interdependent, and Mr Price's tale is miserably ill-told. Hence his .complacent admiration for characters whose actions show them up. Here you oan can only have your cake if you eat it as well; Vanbrugh's heroines, played by the sexiest actresses in the most ravishing hats, the snazziest sacks, have a fiercer glamour precisely because they are also busy dissecting their own preten- tiousness and vanity. The elegance, honesty and the vicious scurrility so narrowly skirted in The Provok'd Wife are sadly missed today.

Entirely lacking, too, from Joan Littlewood's Intrigues and Amours—the-play not so much re-written as de-fanged in production, desexcd and reissued with a `U' certificate. The cast— some in period costume, some in calf-length gauze dirndls, clumping about in a narrow strip at the front of the Theatre Royal's compara- tively deep stage—seem also remarkably under- rehearsed. Bob Grant and Edward Bishop, as the two gallants, would be enchanting in happier circumstances, and Brian Murphy, miscast as Sir John Brute, has a certain irascible sweetness. But, judging from Miss Littlewood's triumphs in the past, playwrights have always made her impatient: her talent lies rather in tinkering with scripts which deserve it, and, if Vanbrugh annoys her, she would no doubt do amazing things with Boeing-Boeing.

It is four years since Albee's play was trans- lated in Czech as Who's Afraid of Kafka?, and only another five since The Trial came out in Prague with reluctant official support, and ten thousand copies were sold on the day of publi- cation. In this sense, no doubt, the Theatre on the Balustrade's stage version represents a not- abk breakthrough; but one not likely to give the authorities a moment's pause. There is little to cause alarm or despondency in this harmless, not to say anodyne, production—at least, so far as one can judge without the simultaneous trans- lation system which the Czech company with- holds. Since Kafka comes in translation for them as much as for us, this seems unnecessarily snobbish; the English commentary, provided by loudspeaker, is not from the book nor especially faiffiful to it, and consists largely of extraneous interpretations whose banality is liberally

reflected in the production itself. For a supposedly avant-garde company, in fact, this production (by Jan Grossman) is curiously backward-looking, relying as much on cheap melodrama—girls with heaving bosoms writhing in coils on all sides—as on that dowdy experimentalism of the 1920s and '30s from which Kafka himself was perfectly free. The set is a revolving scaffold, against a turbulent backcloth apparently representing the Titans' fall from heaven. The acting is sketchy, movement restless—chiefly consisting of short sharp rushes by Josef K (Jan Preucil, who looks -the part to perfection, from his habit of furtively consulting a pocket mirror to his slicked-back hair and cavernous eyes) in and out the shadows at his back. Atmosphere is crudely attempted in tinny religious music—borne out by the religious symbolism gratuitously smuggled in at the end when, along with numerous other deprivations, we have to put up with the loss of those two plump, pallid executioners in their non-collaps- ible top hats—and amplified whispers, footfalls, creaking doors, etc. Along with his unanswer- able bleakness, we have lost also Kafka% intense visual imagination, and his detailed humdrum solidity.

This, in short, would be a sad end to this year's. munificent World Theatre Season, except that the company brought two proddc- tions, the second a mime programme which opens tonight and which, if Lord Snowdon's extraordinary photograph in the programMe is any guide, promises something rich and very strange.