Theatre
Empty Voices
By BAMBER GASCOIGNE
A Cheap Bunch of Nice Flowers. (New Arts.)—The Witch of Edmonton. (Mer- maid.)
THE flavour of blarney is a little like garlic. Garlic heightens the taste of a good dish, and partially conceals the lack of it in a poor one. So it is with the quips and quiddities of the Erse. With their help an Irish playwright can delay by at least a scene or two, and sometimes by far more, our recog- nition that there is a yawning gap at the centre of his play.
Edna O'Brien's first play, A Cheap Bunch of Nice Flowers, offers several pleasantly zany Irish ideas. There is talk, for example, of a deaf old lady who made elaborate electrical arrangements so that if the phone rang in the daytime the lights switched on, and if it rang at night they all switched off. Needless to say, when she had seen her way to lifting the receiver, she couldn't hear a word. This, like several other titbits, is pleasantly diverting, though totally irrelevant to the play. One favourite vein of Miss O'Brien's humour consists of crazy non sequiturs—'If only Ed applied myself more to the crozzword puzzles, I'd be wearing striped shirts by now.' This is funny at the time, but depends far too strongly on the brogue. Another vein is unfunny at the very first cheep. 'How are your gall-stones?' `Galling.'
The theme at the heart of all this decoration is a familiar but honourable one. An ambitious middle-aged woman, Winifred Hennessey, has put all her energies into her journalistic and political career and has utterly neglected her daughter, Ria. Ria's teenage reaction has been to withdraw into a world of glossy make-believe, and to indulge in more and more outrageous methods of trying to attract her mother's atten- tion. The extreme of these is her announcement that she is pregnant, after a one-night encounter with her mother's new lover. She announces this on the very day when her mother has discovered that a cancer has left her with only two months to live—so, when her mother caps Ria's an- nouncement with an even more sensational one, Ria assumes that her mother, like herself, is lying. It is one more countermove in the battle to be centre of attention.
The situation produces one or two touching moments—the contrast, for example, between Ria's dreams and her pathetic eagerness to marry the middle-aged lover as soon as it is suggested; or the final scene where the mother, almost dead now, tries to help Ria to confess her lie by saying that she was, all the time, lying about her illness. Ria takes her mother's hands and guides them towards the flat stomach under her maternity dress—but at the last moment she cannot face the contact and turns away into solitary madness.
The dramatic faults of the play are chiefly that Ria is far too mad far too soon (it is nothing short of insanity to disbelieve in her mother's illness) and that Miss O'Brien com- pletely fails to turn the girl's solitariness into
drama. She thinks it enough to show mother and daughter talking but not connecting—often on the most basic level of not answering each other's remarks. So the girl floats about uttering whimsical gobbets of fantasy in a total vacuum, which makes for an infuriating and almost im- possible acting part. and one that certainly floors the beautiful Susannah York, whose stage tech- nique is at the moment very awkward. Eithne Dunne gives a good solid performance as the mother, and Marie Kean is pleasantly sardonic as a comic char who has many of the best lines and who is cheerfully called 'char' to her face by the others—primarily, it turns out, because her name is Charlotte.
The Witch of Edmonton is a piece of Jacobean stage-carpentry, using many of the details of a contemporary case of witch-hunting. Dekker, Ford and Rowley were the chief among divers authors, and the play is, understandably, a mess. One of the juiciest horrors is the sucking of blood from the old witch's nipples by a dog, and the best performance is by Timothy Bates as a clown.
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