Theatre
Ebb and flow
Mark Amory
The Assassin (Greenwich) Funny Turns (King's Head) The Black Hole of Calcutta (Albany Em- pire)
Olga's is a drab room in a 'small central European country' in 1945. Hugo, just out of prison, joins her. There is mention of poisoned chocolates having been sent to him; his standing with 'the party' is shaky. Soon it is spelled out for us: if the murder he committed was political assassination, he is acceptable, if it was only the act of a jealous husband, he will himself be ex- ecuted at midnight. But all he can say to loving Olga's questions is that he does not know himself, he was, and is, hopelessly confused. The next five scenes flash back to delineate his confusion. So there is no doubt about who is going to kill whom, the question is why. The former title, Crime Passionel, slightly suggests one answer, the new one, The Assassin, slightly suggests the other.
But we know better and not only because the play is by Jean-Paul Sartre. This is polemical melodrama where the sudden ex- plosions and cries in the night are the sugar on the pill. Sooner or later there will come, and probably stay, the dull bit, the author's message, when two or more characters thrash out the rights and wrongs of blind obedience — sacrificing your friends to the cause — and indeed of political assassina- tion. There will be little interest in character, no humour and a tendency to assert rather than persuade. This is a hostile stereotype of the sort of play many of the newer writers were producing in the late Sixties and early Seventies and of course it is unfair to the best of them. David Hare certainly deals in real people, Howard Bren- ton supplies sharply entertaining dialogue, David Edgar scrupulously allows the wick- ed a hearing, Trevor Griffiths is incapable of having a man with a gun come in just because the action is flagging. It is unfair to Sartre too because he does manage to make the abstract bits interesting. The promised dissection of motive is per- functory; Hugo, a middle-class communist, apparently because he was made to swallow castor oil by his bourgeois parents, is ridiculous but not entirely foolish. He is aware of what his comrades think of him and even that his enthusiasm for action is shallow. His target is Hoederer, an ex- perienced, even weary, manoeuvrer, who wishes for tactical reasons to form a government of national unity before the Russians arrive. This means a deal with the fascist (and charming) Prince Paul, also a realist, and Karsky, excitable leader of the liberals — that is to say betrayal of the party. Hugo is made Hoederer's secretary without qualifications or difficulty and, curiously, takes his wife along. Like Hamlet he suffers doubts and delays but finally manages to do the deed, though, like Hamlet, his motives seem to be more per- sonal than political.
Meanwhile the interest of the play has shifted, not to the confrontation of ideas between victim and killer but to the contrast in their characters. It is hopelessly uneven. Hoederer is capable of ruthless action but he knows what he is doing and assesses the cost. He may be wrong (it sounded to me as if he was) but his actions are considered not neurotic; somehow Claudius has emerged as the hero, Hamlet as self-indulgent and not very interesting. The production accen- tuates this largely through Edward Wood- ward's commanding performance, charm- ing off duty, industrious on, intelligent always. The play languishes when he leaves, revives on his return, like a sea anemone. Hugo's wife seems to have strolled in from some West End comedy, No Shooting Please, We're Czechoslavakian perhaps; it is not a displeasing performance, just an in- appropriate one, but as with callow Hugo, I find it impossible to judge how much of the fault lies in the writing.
In a thin couple of weeks I have caught up with two sparsely-populated near- revues, which have been touring success- fully. Funny Turns has Victoria Wood in voluminous yellow dungarees occupying territory somewhere between an unaggres- sive Bette Midler and a down-market Joyce Grenfell. She sings her own songs about bras and sex and slimming, chats to the au- dience and risks a touch of pathos now and then. Before the interval we had her hus- band, The Great Sorprendo, doing conjur- ing tricks with a Spanish accent. The trou- ble with these is that, like shooting stories, they must end with either a hit, or slightly more enjoyably, a miss; there is not a lot of room for surprise. It is doubtless very clever to get someone to tear up a card and then discover the pieces in a. thrice-sealed casket but all along it is perfectly clear that that is what is going to be lurking inside. For- tunately the Great S, an engaging creature in a black wig, keeps the emphasis on his patter, though he is giggling so much he can hardly get out the stream of gags and in- sults: 'What's your name? Hee hee hee. Ruth? Oh bad luck, hee hee hee. Isn't this fun?' A diverting evening, as is The Black Hole of Calcutta, though the silliness here threatens to swamp all in the second half. The cast of the National Theatre of Brent (Zulu, Charge of the Light Brigade) has been expanded to three, who scamper about, throw chapaties in the air and tell you all you already knew and not much more about the Indian Mutiny. Fine, but I think I shall skip their Russian Revolution, Great War or whatever comes next.
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