Theatre
Disease of Violence
By ALAN BRIEN I HAVE never seen a play which created its own mad, obsessed, other-world so completely as Sergeant Musgrave's Dance. Partly this is due to the night- mare draughtsmanship of the designer Jocelyn Herbert. Miss Herbert's world is half Ackerman print, half German silent film—remote, yet alive, in the centre of one of those crystal balls which foam into a snow storm when you turn them up- side down. Her patterns are black and white on sepia lit by blotches of colour. The scarlet uni- forms, the shining rifles, the warm brown bar counter, the heavy dark trunks are all solid and three-dimensional, but outside and around them is wrapped the thick white blanket of winter. The scenes are set in a mining village in the North of England eighty years ago. The atmosphere is one tit isolation and insulation—a beseiged Toytown where life hibernates while gestures are frozen solid by strike and storm. It has the cosy death- liness of a heart-attack in a coffin, a murder in an igloo, a crucifixion in an airing cupboard.
In reality, we are all familiar with the human being overwhelmed and dominated by the in- human objects his race has created. Not only the tin-chapel Baptist in St. Peter's, the Gorbals Communist in the House of Commons, the cow- boy in Wall Street, but also the Prime Minister in a slum back-street, the film star in an air-raid shelter, the millionaire in an air crash. We all soak in emotions and attitudes from the things which are bigger than both of us. Yet how rarely is this consciousness of a physical universe outside ever conveyed on the stage. The first achievement of Lindsay Anderson, the director of Sergeant Mus- grave's Dance, lies in imparting to his actors the uneasy sense that free will is simply the oppor- tunity to choose the wrong .turning in a bricks- and-mortar maze. Mr. Anderson's cast are as palpable as the atmosphere that Miss Herbert has built around them.
The behaviour which Lindsay Anderson has to Present on the stage is, at least superficially, melo- dramatic—that is to say, the characters' reactions have always to be several sizes too large for their actions. The mention of a man's name in a pub resounds like a cannonade. The drop of a trunk Oh a quayside starts ofT tremors of an earthquake. The hoisting of a skeleton to a flagpole is expected to change the world. Mr. Anderson accepts the melodrama and even underlines and emphasises it in the style of a UFA thriller. He uses an eerie - warbling note like that of a musical saw to rivet our attention to the insanity hovering above his characters. A sepulchral dissonant organ march ushers in the acts. These are all, in a sense, Jrvingesque devices more fitting to the Lyceum than the Court. But, amazingly, they work.
Both decor and direction could hardly be more effective—but what about the play? Readers, and writers, occasionally protest to me that I am over- concerned with finding morals in plays, that I think every anecdote must also be a parable. I take comfort from Jung's rather ambiguously impressive remark—'No life is ever meaningless.' Every picture tells a story and every story smuggles through a message. And no one could imagine that John Arden constructed the extra- ordinary events in Sergeant Musgrave's Dance simply to keep us asking 'What happens next?' Four red-coated deserters, rich with stolen funds, armed with stolen weapons, are on the run in Victorian England. Hounded by the Eumenides of real and imaginary guilts, they are taking the corpse of a comrade back to his home town as a macabre gesture of renunciation of Britain's colonial wars. Mr. Arden reveals these bare facts, and the elaborate fictions that everyone builds upon them, in deliberate, terrifying slow-motion. The basic point is simple—you cannot order men to be free, you cannot preach pacifism with a gun. This text begins by being hinted at in whispers and ends up shouted in a scream. But echoes of it keep bouncing back with additions and subtractions, footnotes and headlines, glosses and commentaries. There is also the suggestion that violence is a disease and that those who carry the germ infect the sick they nurse. There is also the warning that the class-war makes addicts of its volunteers and that its opposing generals will combine to destroy the outsider who comes be- tween them. There is also the conviction that God can never take a hand in the game without break- ing his own rules. All these ideas, and many more, keep on sliding into each other without Mr. Arden ever seeming to be quite sure which is which and why.
Sergeant Musgrave's Dance would have been hailed as an undoubted masterpiece if it had been in German, or if it had carried the magic names Brecht or Ibsen on the programme. It is confusing, provocative, elusive—almost as if you were half- remembering some shattering film classic from childhood whose plot now escapes you. Whatever its moments of boredom and reticence, it is at least twice as worth-while as Brand and not much inferior to Mother Courage. It is worth visiting if only for the decor, the direction and the acting. Almost all the performances have that magisterial, heroic professionalism that is the one quality still too often lacking among our good, naturalistic, relaxed young actors today. Ian Bannen is the monomaniac sergeant—a soldier stuffed stiff with ramrods and guncotton. whose madness shines through only in restless eyes which swivel like greased ball-bearings. His three disciples (Alan Dobie, Frank Finlay and Donal Donnelly) are rankers ill at ease without the barrack walls around them—three real individuals who yet shrink to types whenever they are caught in the searchlight of the sergeant's insanity. Freda Jack- son as the matriarchal pub-owner and Patsy Byrne as her sluttish barmaid are also convincing period figures. They, too, willingly sacrifice a showy solo turn to obtain those balanced en- semble effects at which Mr. Anderson aims.
Andrew Sinclair's My Friend Judas has been almost obliterated in my memory by the impact of Sergeant Musgrave's Dance. Almost everything you have read in its disfavour is true—it is full of soggy epigrams, adolescent randiness, embarrassing sentimentality, ludicrous complications, and page upon page of silly chatter. Fred Sadoff, the direc- tor, makes all the behaviour as plausible as pos- sible, though he seems to be operating unde: the impression (understandable enough when you read the text) that Cambridge is some kind of pro- gressive Borstal in a state of mutiny. But I find it hard to understand why he should imagine that all the guests at a party would squeeze into what can only be a pantry whenever the principals want to have a private row, why anyone who is about to commit suicide would turn on the gas ring and then light it, why the smartest, most admired undergraduate should wear a shirt with cuffs which project three inches over his finger tips, why the dons should call their students by the surnames on even the more formal occasions and yet the students call college servants 'Mr.' on even the most informal. My Friend Judas is fairly im- probable anyway—such sloppy details only help to move into the complete dream-world of the Hotspur and the Magnet. I gather that Mr. Sadolf was never at Cambridge. At times I began to wonder whether Mr. Sinclair was either: except that, underneath all the childish nonsense of the plot, I still could feel some kind of truth. Mr. Sinclair has not presented an undergraduate world as it is. but he may have produced a painstakingly clinical portrait of undergraduates as they hope the townees imagine they are. Dinsdale Landen, faced with the task of turning this damp dream of a hero into flesh and blood, manages to be tough, and intelligent, even occasionally ingratiating. Some day I would like to see him in a play.
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