Theatre

Playing Truant

By ALAN BRIEN

Beyond the Fringe. The Seagull. Romulus the Great. Mary Stuart in Scotland. (Edinburgh Festival.)

A TRADMON seems to be growing up at the Edin- burgh Festival that there are only two kinds of drama on show. There are the plays which are worth seeing and on their

way already to London. And there are the plays which are not worth seeing and are on their way already to nowhere. If this pattern continues, if the Festival remains a cut-price cultural beano for Scottish middle- brows who want to save the price of a ticket to London and at the same time indulge their pas- sion for parochial melodrama, then it will soon be impossible for Sassenach critics to justify playing truant from the West End each autumn. As Agate used to say to his editor when asked to visit Kew---`Sir, I am your critic for the Metro- polis, not for Outer Mongolia.' The only exception so far to this rigid dicho- tomy has been Beyond the Fringe—a frenzied, skeletal, uncompromising late-night revue by four Young men in fluorescent shirts who may never Meet again in front of the same blank backcloth.

It is a satirical entertainment which is hard to describe except to say that it is unlike any other ever staged. The basic approach might almost be

summed up as logical-positivist comedy : politi- cal elichds, social stereotypes, emotional manner- isms and class attitudes are bombarded under the distorting microscope with dancing electrons of Wit until each reveals its inner skeleton. The company of four ask how-questions rather than whY-questions. They are fascinated by vowels and gestures and tics and rhythms of speech and behaviour. How does the Prime Minister reply to a letter of resignation? How does an apocalyp- tic sect greet the failure of the world to- end? 11°w would Conservative young fogies brainwash a Member of the Leningrad Symphony Orches-

tra? , ow do the Old Vic overact Shakespeare?

Mimicry is one of their sharpest scalpels- niinlicrY so deadly precise and scientifically de- voted that the victim is flayed alive and still lives "conscious of his missing skin. Alan Bennett's "Personation of a typical Times leader-reader, a. Prematurely old schoolboy giving an anti- ;tellectual pi-jaw, was so successful that a good half of the Edinburgh audience swallowed his irony unchewed and applauded his ambukes to Left-Wing marchers. 'They get so riA.et about some minor detail of the internal policy of the !'Sally-elected. Government of South Africa that won't eat tinned 'pineapples . . .', he said with weary middle-aged boredom amid the clap- 13,‘Ing. Even more devastating was his incarnation like a strangulated Anglican clergyman—'Life's a tin of sardines, we're all looking for the key. At least I know I am. And in the sardine tin of life there always is, isn't there, a corner you can't reach? I would ask you all tonight to consider whether . . .' Mr. Bennett is a gig- lamped, square-faced, mild-spoken young Oxford academic who specialises in ten years of media:- val history. But the tone and edge of his material can be guessed from his query in conversation after the show—'Did you think I was savage enough?' he asked. 'I had thought of doing a Remembrance Day sermon.'

Physically, if not metaphysically, the star of the show is Jonathan Miller, a lanky, tow-haired, staring-eyed disciple of St. Vitus with the face of an agonised unicorn. He moves across the stage with the unpredictable hop, skip and jump of a man in the middle of an invisible obstacle race, freezing occasionally in the pose of a marsh warbler or a master spy, confidentially describing various bizarre adventures in baroque prose such as his account of buying second-hand trousers— 'I steeled myself to the alien crotch and . . Mr. Miller occasionally allowed whimsy to dampen his crisp patter in his solos, but his parody of Shakespeare is the nastiest knee in the groin the Bard has suffered since Irving savaged him with scissors and paste.

The other two loons involved are Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Mr. Cook is a languid, curly- haired Gentile version of Jonathan Miller—a Master of Foxhounds who hunts down accents with savage imperturbability. He is brilliant wear- ing Mr. Macmillan's teeth or adopting a dere- lict's whine. But his best reading of all was a line in his sketch about the end of the world. 'Will there be a great wind and mighty waves, brother?' asks a follower. Mr. Cook surveys him with pained forgiveness. 'If the word of God is anything to go by, there will,' he explains. Mr. Moore's acting technique is coarser than his col- leagues', but he is a born jester who cannot help mugging and his musical parodies and songs are a separate entertainment in themselves.

The Seagull was given an intelligent, sympa- thetic and stylish production by the Old Vic under John Fernald. But since it is now playing in London it could hardly be argued that this was a unique Edinburgh offering. Sixty-four years after its first performance it is difficult to under- stand how any critics could have complained that this one at least of Chekhov's plays lacked plot and point. If anything it is overplotted—a modern audience is conditioned to pick up a symbol as casually as it would get out a cigarette. When the handsome and fashionable author, Trigorin, casually begins to fascinate Nina, the sweetheart

of his mistress's young son, and says, 'A subject for a short story : a young girl, like you, has lived beside a lake from childhood. She loves the lake as a seagull does, and she's happy and free as a seagull. But a man chances to come along, sees her and, having nothing better to do, destroys her, just like this seagull here,' then already the dramatist is making his pattern too explicit and self-conscious. When later Nina goes slightly mad and calls herself a seagull, when the actual sea- gull is stuffed and presented to Trigorin, and when Nina exits into the dark night moaning

'A subject for a short story,' it is difficult not to feel irritated by an author who will not trust you to draw your own parallels.

Chekhov's genius, however, does not lie in such rather obvious and naive diagrams. The impact of The Seagull comes from an explosion much deeper below the surface. Almost all the charac- ters are impelled towards tragedy by the desire to rewrite their lives—each one, like old Uncle Sorin, could call his autobiography The One Who Wished. Irina, the ageing actress, and Tri- gorin, her weak-willed lover, are trapped in each other's arms. Nina takes the older woman for her model and becomes an actress. Irina's son Konstantin takes the older man as his model and becomes a writer. Outwardly both have sonic degree of success 'yet discover that their model is also their rival—that in becoming the thing they hate they have lost the thing they love. The subtlety of this weaving of cross-purposes is shown by the very clumsiness that tangles an attempt to isolate its threads from the fabric of the play in action. Having set in motion this cat's-cradle of ambition and envy, Chekhov then makes sure that The Seagull can only move us fully with acting of superb quality. When asked by the Moscow Art Theatre how it should be played he replied tartly, 'As well as possible Nina's role, for instance, cannot be carried 01 r by an ingenue—pale good looks, a tremulous voice, hands that flutter like moths, the general air of a well-bred ghost-maiden, are not sufli- cient to make this seagull soar. Chekhov has written Nina for a virtuoso. Ann Bell is a brave beginner but she cannot, for example, command the range which makes her speech in Konstantin amateur play in the first act so sincerely bad that when she repeats it in the third act it has mag • tally become sincerely good because we see in the two renderings everything that has happened to her as an.actress and a woman since that night. Judith Anderson, a seasoned and intelligent veteran, is almost well enough equipped for Irina who has a similar double-image to project —the famous tragedienne who decorates and falsifies all her own off-stage emotions with the almost automatic posturings and tricks of her art. But she seemed to me the wrong age for the Irina of so young a Trigorin as Tony Britton she lacked the full-bosomed, peach-fed, chain- pagne-slaked sex appeal of the vamp-matron which could melt Trigorin's will so quickly under her hot cushioned embrace.

Tom Courtenay, as Konstantin, is also out of focus with Chekhov's background.. Like man!, talented young actors today, he is determined to be one of those stage individuals so much beloved of critics who 'can walk straight into the audi- ence.' But he forgets that characters in plays are meant to be characters in plays—their whole personality is an illusion sustained by an elab- orate scaffolding of words and looks and lights and conversations with other illusions.

Tony Britton is a Trigorin from the right age —but an elegant, confident, engaging portrait built up entirely from the outside. Only the rel: tively minor characters in this production seem entirely successful. And the triumph of the even- ing is Cyril Luckham's Peter Sorin. This is a masterly incarnation of an old self-pitying, sell critical bureaucrat, in which the dialogue has become so much a part of the actor that he can orchestrate it with little laughs and coughs and

stutters and pauses without ever once seeming to show off his technical equipment. Ralph Michael's Doctor Dorn, suave and relaxed as a backwoods Otto Kruger, and Gerald James's Shamrayev, the robustly tactless retailer of theatrical anecdotes, both manage to be solid, real and vet unobtrusive parts of the scenery.

Despite these reservations, these flaws which only a masterpiece can magnify to such impor- tance, The Seagull dwarfs almost any theatrical experience of the current season. Chekhov has SO many things to say at once, so many insights to convey, that even if only half of them shine through to the audience then the evening must be worth while. By contrast, the two Edinburgh- "IN Plays seem hardly worth dissecting. The Glasgow Citizens Theatre production of Ronut rsius.. the Great confirms my belief that Friedrich ", urrenmatt is an ingenious stage-carpenter who has too many words struggling to express too few. ideas. The entire play would have been polished off in two long monologues by Shaw, or in the first act by Bridie Diirrenmatt endlessly prepares us for one big confrontation scene be- tween the last lazy trivial Roman emperor of a seedy empire and the first of the German kings or blood and iron. When it comes, he throws away the drama and the excitement with a calculated anti-climax which cannot conceal his almost complete lack of any attitude to such vinnuellaiboomed questions as the value of the indi- id, the ethics of violence, the struggle be- tween duty and love, and half a dozen other ?Mons moral conundrums. Mary Stuart in "land, presented by the Gateway Company, ;flakes one realise how much Scandinavia needed Ibsen

if Bjornson was one of its immortals.