THEATRE
Include me out
KENNETH HUR R EN
My feelings about experimental theatre have come to be much the same as my feelings about experimental medicine: it is com- forting to know that somewhere, out there, it is all going on, and that every now and then the processes of trial and error will result in something wonderful; but my eagerness to be one of the guinea pigs, as patient or au- dience, is not marked.
There is also the fact that reviews of the avant-garde—as the experimentation is sometimes jocularly called—tend, if adverse, to seem to me like heartless assaults upon earnestly well-intentioned if pathetically defenceless enterprises: or. if favourable, to be couched in the sort of woolly in- tellectualising that guarantees a reprint by Peter Simple or Pseud's Corner or both.
All this may explain why I have not been among those present at Conte Together, a three-week jamboree of the stuff that has been corralled at the Royal Court and threatens to lay it waste. (One of the shows, if I can rely upon the report of Mr Wardle in the Times, 'ends with an explosion of smoke bombs that quickly empties the house while the cast get busy smashing up chairs.') A less easily intimidated colleague is expected to emerge with a comprehensive account of these goings-on for next week's issue.
This week, this department makes only a token appearance, for seeking alternative subject matter I was out of luck right down the line. Items called The Net and Shack- Shack, at the Jeannetta Cochrane and the Arts respectively, though hardly ex- perimental, turned out to be petrifyingly inept, and not worth a moment of your reading time, let alone an evening out of your life.
I must straighten the record on one point. though: it has been pointed out that I might have been clearer a couple of weeks ago in my reference to Sam. the Highest Jumper of Them All, a bygone Theatre Workshop pro- duction that was not personally directed by Joan Littlewood. Conceding that the lady's influence on this piece was only indirect, I still find it lodged obstinately in mind as typical of her productions. The way in which it was put together (that is, apparently, col- laboratively improvised wholly in rehearsal) seemed to me to typify, in excelsis, Miss Littlewood's working methods.
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