Theatre
Life in the Cave
By ALAN BRIEN Billy Liar. (Cambridge.) —Once Upon a Mat- tress. (Adelphi.) Billy Liar has been widely described ' as a farce—if it were, it would be a very poor one. The compulsive lie- spinner might indeed be an efficient . trigger for farce (though a compul- sive truth-speaker would be even more promising), but the trigger should immediately fire off a train of tiny explosions which keep the charac- ters prancing like mounted police among fire- works. The people in a farce ought to be a mixed bag of incompatible types pursuing each other through a variety of incongruous settings. They must be toy-theatre cut-outs who never get into their depth, a travelling frieze of two- dimensional caricatures petrified for ever in a comic attitude. A drop of genuine emotion would burn right through a farce like the over- spill of stomach acid on the carpet in the indi- gestion ads. As Billy Liar fits none of these rules, I assume it'is not, nor was meant to be, a farce.
Billy Liar is a realistic lower-middle-class comedy with offshoots into fantasy which sprout from the central figure of Billy—a sullenly lazy adolescent cocooned in the rags and patches of his imagination. Like the solid, ugly house in Alan Tagg's set, Billy is permanently semi- detached from his neighbours. He is both secre- tive and exhibitionist. What he hides is the dull truth, what he displays are his outrageous sub- stitutes for it. As played by Albert Finney, Billy Fisher is the sort of modern young man who will be instantly recognised by anyone who has grown up in the sub-arctic ghost towns of the industrial North. (The Northern emphasis is im- portant, I am sure, because of the pervasive cold there which often over-prolongs the period of immersion in that great trough of sloth between the bright schoolboy and the determined adult. It is this yearning for body-warmth which makes sleep a drug, washing an act of courage, undress- ing. and dressing a chilly discipline, movement a last resort and day-dreaming the most necessary of luxuries.) Mr. Finney wears the dirt between his toes and the grease shine on his face like the uniform of an elite corps—he exactly cap- tures that air of moonstruck hysteria and brilliant idiocy which 1 have seen so often in my school photographs. From the depths of his provincial cave, the prehistoric teenager keeps up his muttered rituals, still hoping that he can transform the world outside without ever leaving his bed.
The moments in the third act when Billy does brave the tangible air have rightly been much praised. Here he stands alone in the garden and simply with the aid of a raspberry cane material- ises in one mimic incarnation after another with laugh-defying seriousness until he ends up a soldier-mourner, resting on his rifle, while the `Last Post' sounds for his grandmother lying cold and dead in the front room. Both Mr. Finney and Lindsay Anderson, the director, have managed to preserve the truth of this scene by never once allowing the sincerity of the impulse to melt into comic showmanship.
Billy's family are also hacked out of reality and interpreted with broad, but accurate, strokes by George A. Cooper, Mona Washbourne and Ethel Griffies. The painstaking obsession with trivialities, the baffled surrender in face of death and desertion, the emphatic circumlocutory ora- tions—these are everyday facts of life in a milieu too often cartooned on the stage by even the most progressive directors. Why, then, is the final effect of Billy Liar, despite all its incidental pleasures, that of over-stuffed emptiness like the aftermath of a cream bun feast? The flaw lies in Billy's isolation in the theatre from the compli- cated confusions of the world outside his house. His three girl friends all seem unreal and two- dimensional—unconvincing sketches of person- ality epitomised in one characteristic cliche like Ann Beach's passion for oranges. Billy is seen almost entirely through the eyes of his family. We want to believe in the basic intelligence which hides under his fantasies but instead we see him so moronised by his home routines that even his scholarship to the grammar school comes as a shock. It is perhaps this feeling that Billy Liar is only one episode in a running serial which has created in some minds the conviction that it is a thin, whimsical entertainment with farcical trim. mings. Billy Liar is one half of a very good comedy which spends too much time looking out of the window without ever crossing the threshold.
Once Upon a Mattress is one of those second. string American musicals which seem to tempt chauvinistic critics to vent on its weaknesses all their resentment that the British theatre has no Adler and Ross let alone a Rodgers and Hart Mattress certainly has weaknesses. The spoof fairy-tale has been done so often, and so often so badly, in our Christmas shows that almost all the possible jokes can be identified long before they cross the horizon. The George Abbott diree tion, with its heavy underlinings and frenzied peripatetics, seems on Broadway like professional expertise. But here it comes across as a succession of painful nudges and tiresome winks. British prudishness also permits childhood classics to be vulgarised with traditional gags about kippers, mothers-in-law, sweaty feet and old cheese, but not to be sophisticated with wisecracks about seduction, pregnancy, mother-fixation and neck. ing. Mattress is too often aiming to provoke stock responses which just do not exist here. On its credit side, there is the music of Mary Rodgers and the performance of the one American player, Jane Connell. Miss Rodgers has not got the con. fident, magisterial, melodic generosity of Richard Rodgers (but then, who has?) but her songs are neat, pretty and inventive with a cunning sirn, plicity of craftsmanship which is easily under- rated. Jane Connell's only fault is that she is seen less often as the show proceeds. But where she is given an opportunity this mop-haired, infant- delinquent seizes it with both hands, stuffs it down the front of her dress and shakes the life into it. Only when these two talents really col• laborate, as in 'Shy' or 'Song of Love, does Once Upon a Mattress sparkle and fizz.
Previous page
