CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
MR. ALEC GUINNESS leads the Old Vic Company's attack on this great play with distinction and considerable originality. Most actors see Richard as a poet who was also a king • Mr. Guinness, I think, sees him as a king who was also a poet. I seem to remember Mr. Gielgud, in the opening scene when Richard attempts to arbitrate between Bolingbroke and Mowbray, toying with a rose in an effectively distrait manner ; and I think that the actor's task—and probably the audience's toe—is made easier if in the first half of the play Richard is presented as an obvious misfit.
Mr. Guinness's approach is subtler. His Richard never lacks authority; his outbursts are never tantrums. You get—and I think you are meant to get—the impression of a sensitive, introspective young man with a strong will who, having been born royal, devotes all his mind and character to the arts of kingship but only succeeds in being a bad king. This Richard is never a weakling, any more than Hamlet is ; even when he is deposed he dominates the men who brought him, down. He fails because there is that in his char- acter which causes him to take the wrong decisions, to trust the wrong men ; and his preoccupation with the divine right, his insist- ence on the inviolability of his own status despite the contrary lessons of history and the*" sad stories of the deaths of kings," are the by- product of his past efforts to equate himself to the throne, to sub- ordinate the poet to the king, to take the whole business seriously. On these lines—if I have not misread the actor's intentions—Mr.
Guinness gives a very fine performance indeed; is a kind of quiet, almost sly, precision about his acting wich is as attractive as it is difficult to define.
Sir Ralph Richardson, who also produced the play, was excellent as John of Gaunt, and Mr. Harry Andrews' fiery and self-confident Bolingbroke was exactly the right foil to Mr. Guinness. Mr. Nicholas Hannen and Sir Lewis Casson stood out among the ruck of factious noblemen, and all the small parts were adequately played. Mr. Michael Warre's setting, on the other hand, was not good. Two tall and asymmetrical pergolas were neither useful nor decorative, and a doorway underneath one of them, besides leading nowhere, was so low that the ladies, wearing the head-dresses of the period, had practically to go down on hands and knees to get through it.
The trouble about the revival of ro66 and All That, which I thoroughly enjoyed when it was first produced, is that it never quite makes up its mind what kind of a joke it is. As well as ragging the history books, it drags in a lot of other and somehow incompatible Aunt Sallies, like Mr. Shinwell and Mr. Max Intrator, and in spite of Mr. Leslie Henson the mixture fails to come off.
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Mr. Cochran's production at the Adelphi is an anomaly. It may not ravish you (though I don't see why it shouldn't), but I defy anyone not to admire its quality. Here is the real stuff. No sub- stitutes, no evasions, no excuses ; so confident, so zestful and so beguiling is the showman's attack that you have no time even to stop and wonder how they manage to do such things—on such a scale, with such precision—in these days. Small children some- times use the epithet " pre-war " as a synonym for " super " or " smashing," meaning that a thing is very good, is what it ought to be but usually, nowadays, is not. In this sense Bless The Bride is pre-war. Sir Alan Herbert's kindly wit and notable facility are well set off by Mr. Vivian Ellis's music ; and the huge cast, led by Miss Lizbeth Webb and M. Georges Guetary, are extremely accomplished, beautifully disciplined and ',infectiously cheerful. The scenery is opulent, the dresses lavish and engaging and the plot (which is set in 1871) of no particular importance. I do not know how many men and women are directly involved in each performance, but what with the cast, the orchestra, the theatre staff, the dressers and all the rest, it must work out at over zoo. Outside the theatre the evening papers announced that the striking London dockers now totalled more than 10,000 ; if only (I couldn't help reflecting) the sturdy, the splendid British workman could manage to stick to the business in hand as loyally and effectively as do his inessential, supposedly feckless, traditionally rather dis- reputable, certainly more insecure opposite numbers in the theatre. . . . Bless The Bride, is something more than an anodyne.
PETER FLEMING.
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