3 MAY 1957, Page 27

Contemporary Arts

Full of Horrors

The Balcony. By Jean Genet. (Arts.) —Tea and Sympathy. By Robert Anderson. (Comedy.) — Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors. By William Shakespeare. (Old Vic.)—Janus. By Carolyn. Green. (Aldwych.) IT, Would • be tempting Providence rather too far to taunt the Lord Chamberlain at this moment with being, like Baal, asleep or on a long journey; in any case I hope he has been neither but has been to see this week's plays, which include a brothel scene, a brace of homo- sexuals, several adulterers and an old-fashioned feast of rapine and wholesale murder. He may, for all I know, have been one of those *carried fainting from the first night of Titus Atzdronicus, but if he stayed the course one or two truths may, with luck,' have struck home. First, that this' Shakespearian orgy, which is open to all, is far more likely to debauch the mind of youth, or for that matter age, than the carefully diluted discussion of pederasty at the Comedy or the `What the egg-head saw' peepshow at the Arts, to which one can only gain admittance_ by the elaborate pantomime of becoming a member of the appropriate Theatre Club, or the desperate expedient of becoming a critic. Second, that pimps and homosexuals need not in themselves be particularly corrupting. Third, that since whores lie considerably thicker on the ground than, say, Dowager Duchesses, they are, on balance, likely to make better subjects for plays. Fourth (perhaps I am allowing my enthusiasm' to run away with me), that he had better do some- thing about it.

Take the case of that pillar of French dis- respectability, M. Jean Genet. He has had the bril- liant notion of setting a play about the papier niche illusions which go to make up a man's façade in the most potent of all Freudian forcing- grounds—a fetishist's brothel. Here you may meet the gas-man who dons a.. bishop's regalia and absolves the whore whose wares he is purchasing, and the other small-time tradesmen who dress up as generals or judges or desecrators of the Immaculate Conception before proceeding to work. Queen of this establishment is a business- like harridan by the name of Madame Irma, with a vocation for a job which she insists must be performed in rigorous earnest. The rites are punctuated throughout by the clatter of machine- gun fire, for at the time of the play there is a fierce revolution in full swing in the streets out- side; things are going badly for the old regime and the queen and most of the rest of the govern- ment have been murdered. It is a brain-wave of the Chief of Police, a friend of Madame Irma's, to produce her and the other inmates on the balcony of the establishment as the real queen, bishop, judge and general, thus cowing the mob into obedient adoration and introducing a regime of which the Chief of Police is the dictator and they are the permanent figure-heads.

This account is a gross simplification of a plot which seethes with symbolism and cracks with characters, but one can't help feeling that a little simplification would not have done the play any harm. M. Genet's violent quarrel with his pro- ducer shows that he has not realised how much of his play is practically unproducible—in the second half of it a fog of symbolic rhetoric descends with appalling suddenness; one peers through the pea-super-egos and catches glimpses of strange distorted figures, Power (sexless), Justice (dumb), Religion (bound), which, as one clutches them, fade exasperatingly into the mist. Peter Zarek does his best with the production but the acting might have been better—only Selma vaz Diaz as Madame and Hazel Penwarden as the rebel whore perform with much gusto, the rest move with the wooden control of those who are not amused. This is, though, a serious play and an interesting one; as for its corrupting influence—only the addition of a Lord Chamber- lain as part of the mythology of the brothel could make it more harmless.

After all the talk about homosexuals Tea and Sympathy turns out to be a mawkish but well- streamlined American study of a persecution. Admittedly the. young hero is accused by his crypto-queer housemaster of the worst, on the grounds that he refuses to wear a crew-cut and likes gramophone records (there is also a slight contretemps when he is caught bathing with the suspect member of the staff), but there is never any suggestion that this is more than a smear campaign. In fact, sympathy is enlisted by the housemaster's wife, who sees that he is nothing but a sensitive adolescent and finally seduces him in order to prove it'. Those brought up in the doubtless cynical atmosphere of an English public school will loose off a few incredulous horse laughs, but others may be moved by the sincerity and craftsmanship of the play and the beautiful per- formances of Elizabeth Sellars as the wife and Tim Seely as the boy. Again as mild as mother's milk.

The Old Vic's double bill, on the other hand, is a horror-comic affair which only a determina- tion to sample the whole Shakespearian corpus should take one to see. Barbara Jefford as the barbarian queen and Keith Michell as her blackavised lover have the twenty-odd lines of real poetry in Titus and enjoy saying them. Derek Godfrey in the name part prefers nobility to easy escape and goes down slowly and heroically with his ship into waves of tedium. A miracle of beating might transform the Comedy of Errors from a mechanical set-piece into something genuinely frothy, but a tired cast approaches the second half of the evening with aching arms. Walter Hudd produces.

Janus is the two-faced pseudonym of love- birds Googie Withers and Peter Sallis, who escape from their respective spouses once a year to compose blue historical romances together. What happens when the husband and the tax man turn up? Miss Withers is equal to the situation. She is, as usual, delicious, but an injudicious sneeze from her would blow the whole play into