Theatre
Andromache (Old Vic)
Shirley Valentine (Vaudeville)
Roll over, Racine
Christopher Edwards
Amissed opportunity: that is how we have to describe the first production by Jonathan Miller in his new post as artistic director of the Old Vic. Racine, that great 17th-century French classical dramatist, master of psychology and explorer of the soul, is certainly neglected in this country, and it was a bold venture to stage Andro- mache, Racine's first masterpiece written when he was 28. In his programme note to this production George Steiner speaks of the gap that remains between Racine's art and English receptivity, and of the at best academic courtesy we afford this author. Steiner asks why this should be so and answers by pointing out that all Racine's considerable dramatic challenges are met within the language. Of course, this can be said of any great foreign classic. But in Racine's art there is a special poetic concentration — formal, intense and eco- nomical. Perhaps we have to look no further than his alien theatrical language to see why we neglect him: it is so unlike that mixture of high and low we find, for instance, in Shakespeare. The last thing you should do with Racine — this is surely a first principle for translators — is to pour his spare, tautly controlled lyric genius into an English idiomatic melting-pot.
Miller's production offers us convincing classical rigour in almost every department except for the one that matters most. Eric Korn's translation is quite misconceived, offering us chatty modern colloquialisms which are enough to make you groan out loud at their crassness. Someone gets 'the order of the boot' and 'the cold shoulder'. Astyanax is a 'toddler'. The Trojans are 'shell-shocked'. Meanwhile, Hermione lets us in on her secret intentions: 'What's on my mind is vengeance.' Whatever became, we begin to wonder, of Racine's celebrated and sombre pronouncement of doom, the one he reserved for all pre-Christian sin- ners? . . . 'No way, Andromache.'
All the cast suffer from the bathetic influence of the Korn effect, not least that fine actor, Kevin McNally.His Orestes is a character acting under the impetus of a destiny similar to that of his Greek pro- totype. But time and again McNally's laments take on a tone of merely comic outrage until, at the tragic close, it is almost as if he were impotently shaking his fist and crying, 'Another fine mess you've got me into.'
The production has several virtues. Janet Suzman as Andromache and Pene- lope Wilton as Hermione both touch heights of expressive intensity that are compelling. And Peter Eyre's Pyrrhus is a grave and beautifully spoken study. Above all, the director establishes a fitting style of scrupulously restrained gestures and static hierarchical groupings. I do not know what, if any, backstage controversies led to the rejection of the original commissioned version from Craig Raine. But, at times, you begin to feel that Jonathan Miller and his cast understand the spirit of the play well enough and have decided to get on with it and to act, as it were, against the text they have been saddled with.
In the circumstances they do the best they can. The action is set on Richard Hudson's severely raked set of a tumble- down baroque hall. Both set and lighting suggest a moment of disorder frozen out- side time for the duration of the play — the steep angle of the floorboards giving a giddy sense to the action, as if the players were performing on the edge of a pre- cipice. It is not their fault that the transla- tion tips them over the edge of it.
Willy Russell's artfully written one- woman play has found its way to the West End. The subject of the work is wasted or rather 'unused' life, to use Shirley Valen- tine's own phrase. Aged 42, married to an unthinking husband who likes his mince and chips on a Thursday evening, her children grown up, selfish and remote, Shirley suffers from loneliness and that sense of atrophy endemic to even the most fruitful of marriages.
Not that hers is particularly fruitful. Joe, her husband, sounds a slob. In Act One we find her at home preparing her husband's tea and talking to the wall. Russell gives her a range of Liverpudlian anecdotes and jokes: marriage, Shirley tells us, is like the Middle East — there's no solution. There is a lot of Willy Russell about at the moment and your enjoyment of this piece will depend on how you find his brand of Scouse wit. Most of the humour is of the suburban siege variety: suffering housewife quipping sparkily and sometimes bitterly about her lot in the kitchen and bedroom (sex is like Sainsbury's, she says, but I won't spoil the punch line). To her own great surprise (and the audience's cheering approval), Shirley decides to escape for two weeks in Corfu with a feminist girl- friend without telling her husband. The curtain in Act Two reveals Bruno Santini's beautifully realised island paradise, with Shirley perched on a rock, wearing a bikini and an 'I'm as surprised as you' expression on her face.
Russell plays adroitly enough with a popular cliché — escape to the sun and find your real self amongst the tavernas, Greek waiter-lovers and the sunshine. But the soft-centred sentimentality of this fantasy is skilfully side-stepped (for the most part anyway), by Pauline Collins's bright, sub- tle, touching and engaging performance under the direction of Simon Callow. This actress has most of the audience on her side very early on, and leads them with her into her dark shell of a life and out the other side into the Mediterranean bright- ness. The character complains of loss of appetite for life, but the distinguishing qua- lity of this performance is an indomitable, joky vitality that succeeds in holding the stage single-handed for the entire evening.
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