Theatre
Knotty
Ted Whitehead
The Alchemist (Aldwych) Trembling Giant (Royal Court) Fosdyke II (Bush) How many theatregoers would understand the meaning of libes' or 'knots' or lucus' (chilblains, wild fowl, facial paint) as used by Jonson in The Alchemist? A few drama buffs, perhaps, or those critics who assiduously swot up the text in advance. I confess that I am at one in my ignorance with those parties of German and Japanese tourists who pack the stalls nowadays, and I am therefore very grateful to Peter Barnes for providing a glossary and for editing the text so that it is comprehensible without losing a whit of its freshness and bite. (I wish somebody would do the same for Starsky and Hutch — while I am still figuring out the Brooklynese I have missed two car crashes and three rapes.) Given the bewildering pace of linguistic change in our time, Jonson and Shakespeare will soon be as impenetrable as Beowulf is now, without the assitance of a scrupulous editor like Barnes.
Trevor Nunn's production was run in at Stratford and is immensely self-assured, with lots of detailed comic business and with emphatic performances as the cozeners by John Woodvine and Ian McKellen, the latter in particular obviously relishing the opportunity to display his skill as a quickchange artist. If I resisted it was because I felt I was being invited to laugh along with McKellen. You may, I didn't. The scenario of John McGrath's Trembling Giant sounds rather unlikely: market forces undermine feudalism and lead to the emergence of capitalism, which leads in turn to imperialism and global war; but the voracious capitalist giant is destroyed by revolutionary action in Russia and China, and laid low by inflation in the UK. The English politicians, the unions and the media try desperately to get the giant back on his feet, but it's too late, and they are already infected with the diseases of consumerism and permissiveness. But what of the Scottish people, facing the historic opportunity offered by North Sea oil?
The 7:84 company (Scotland) passionately want their audience to consider this question. The show has reached the Royal Court after an extensive Scottish tour, taking in not only theatres but also town halls, workers' clubs, students' unions and so on. McGrath wears his political heart on his sleeve, and his presentation of history is partial in the extreme; but he has succeeded in placing his question in a historical context, and must have generated some interesting arguments. He has also succeeded in creating an unusually genial mix of song, dance, pantomime and burlesque to tell his didactic fairytale.
The funniest of last year's Christmas shows was The Fosdyke Saga, and I am almost prepared to say the same for the sequel at the Bush, Fosdyke H. But whereas the original gleefully put the boot into some pious myths about the sons of toil, the sequel goes simply for laughs. And there are plenty of these, as the battle for control of the international tripe market moves from Hong Kong to Chicago to Russia and of course to HQ at Salford. George Formby impersonations, a skirmish with the dreaded killer pekinese, the ascent of Everest by the Accrington Stanley Expedition, and the Original Dixieland Tripe Step . . . you can enjoy all these delights (and airbound tripe as well) when the Bush takes both the Fosdyke shows to a series of provincial theatres, starting 2 January in Cardiff and ending 20 February in Wigan.
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