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Personal problem
KENNETH HURREN
It was embarrassing to be told by a col- league that he couldn't have guessed from my review that I'd hated the current Hamlet. But like the palais de danse wall- flower whose friend tipped her off about her halitosis, I'm grateful. Printed opinions don't have bad breath, but they can have a mealy mouth. Sorry if mine are not giving proper offence. (Must remember to gargle twice a day with a dyslogistic solu- tion of contumely and sprinkle my tooth- brush with odium.) The most insidious of the temptations to beset long-term toilers in the criticism dodge is, I'm afraid, equivocation. It is easily enough resisted by the young, still exhilarated by the heady air of journalistic freedom and infatuated by the authority of print. 'For the first ton years of my employ- ment,' the late Wolcott Gibbs once re- called, speaking of how his position as theatre reviewer of the New Yorker had gone to his childish head, 'I have no recol- lection of praising anything.' His experi- ence was not unusual, though it would not. ordinarily be admitted with such engaging candour. Critics are wont to disclaim taking any malicious joy in denigration, assuring their readers, with the wintry arro- gance of schoolmasters, that it is all done in a regretful this-hurts-me-more-than-it- hurts-you spirit of correction; and it is true, I suppose, that only brief careers in the trade can be built on the principle that if you can't say anything good about some- body you should say it anyway (everybody else will enjoy it), a scandalous precept that appeals only to the gifted dilettante, urgently in pursuit of notoriety, just pass- ing through the theatrical woods with his hatchet on his way to becoming a diarist, columnist, television pundit or freelance pornographer.
The rest of us more dedicated practi- tioners, eager to avoid identification with these hustling transients, inevitably run into the equivocation problem in the matter of unfavourable notices. It's not, of course, that we're got at. The good opinion of this column,. for instance, is not to be bought for money and probably not for love. (Those Suspicions you had about the seemingly gratuitous compliments pitched at that spectacularly upholstered actress who did no more than bring in the tea- trolley were unworthy of you, and you can't prove 'a thing.) It's not, either, that we are too much assailed by self-doubt— Or, rather, speaking for myself, I am; but I tend to fight down any nagging thoughts that I could be wrong. that there is room for an alternative view. That kind of un- certainty is as dangerous for reviewers as it is for politicians, who doubtless, as they achieve a reluctant maturity, have the same difficulty in cloaking their private intima- tions of fallibility. The reader, like the voter, is more likely to put his faith in resolute dogma than in honest doubt.
If 1 slip now and then from the ideal of forthright and trenchant disapprobation it can be laid partly, I daresay, to some resi- dual instinct for self-preservation in con- templating the logical end of incessantly discouraging potential theatregoers from going to the theatre. There might also be in it, if you can hold back your tears, a touch of that simple and universal desire to be loved. Who wants a reputation as an inveterate sorehead? For a reviewer around the London theatre these last few months that's a reputation that has not been easy to avoid, and I hope—on my plea of mitigating circumstances—you'll pardon the lapse into- shilly-shallying over the Hamlet.
We come thus introspectively to the items up for review this week. The prob- lem has not eased, and I see that it is weighing heavily on the appraisers in the daily prints, who have been charitable enough to describe as merely `feeble',, or 'terrible', works that are really beyond any such temperate adjectives.
Meeting at Night, which at the time of writing lies in wait for the unwary at the Duke of York's, is, I think, the most dis- maying of these intimidating newcomers, since it is not only, in itself, a composition of paralysing witlessness and ineptitude, but is also, in the fact of its having been produced at all, a calculated posthumous slur on the reputation of the late James Bridle, who is said to have written it. I have no grounds on which to contest the authorship but 1 suspect, contrary to the report that this was Bridie's last play, that the piece is some youthful indiscretion, set down in no more than vague outline before being abandoned and forgotten. I can hardly believe that in 1951, the year in which he died at the age of sixty-three, he woUld have had his compatriots speaking of themselves as `Scotchmen' or would have thought it plausible to find a 'man- servant' in a modest suburban villa. To pluck this palpably discarded manuscript from his effects and present it as his 'last play' is to suggest that after writing the dazzling Daphne Laureola and the compe- tent Mr Gillie he had been swiftly over- taken by senility. It is directed. in a manner of speaking, by Donald McWhinnie, who seem to have had no influence worth mentioning on the performances of Renee Houston, who puts on a defensive music hall turn as the Corn- munist proprietress of a Highland inn, and Wilfrid Hyde White, who drifts ab- stractedly through his role as a confidence trickster, sparing himself the distasteful and hopeless task of imparting conviction to his lines, and at times when he is not actually involved in the action, casting an eye about the audience in what may be either embarrassment or despair—unless, of course, as a practical sort of actor, he is simply counting the house.
At the Royal Court, the incumbent dis- aster is Webster's unelevating melodrama, The Duchess of Ma/fl, under the direction of Peter Gill who has added one more assassination to the multiplicity of mur- ders: that of the play itself. Done as a formal Brechtian exercise, unemotionally acted, without scenery and in costumes of uniform hue (which everybody has resisted identifying as urinal yellow), it is effec- tively stripped of the fragmentary touches of theatricality that give it its only claim on anyone's attention, and exposed cruelly as almost insufferably tedious and quaint.
Finally, there is the revival of three of Noel Coward's mid-'thirties playlets, To- night at 8, at the Fortune. Red Peppers, the one everybody knows, is about a seedy vaudeville team, bickering pathetically be- tween performances of their wretched and doomed little act; We Were Dancing is a brief, limp parody of aborted romance on a tropical verandah; and Family Album is a faded old lavender bag of Victoriana with a vein of comedy verging upon the varicose. Gary Bond and Millicent Martin have the parts taken long ago by Coward and the late Gertrude Lawrence, and if you happened to be in especially indul- gent mind but there I go again.
Wilfrid Hyde White in 'Meeting at Night'
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