THEATRE
French fix
HILARY SPURLING
Ubu Roi (Theatre on the Balustrade at the Aldwych) Le Partage de Midi (Theatre de France at the Aldwych) Don Quixote (Piccadilly)
We may grumble from time to time at our own playwrights but not when you think of what goes on across the Channel. Compared with what the French are up against, in Jarry and Claudel to name but two, and consider- ing how suavely, with what tact and elegance they cope, we have small cause for testiness.
Of the two, in the past week, it is Jarry who for all his crudity, indeed because of it, seems infinitely the more sympathetic; and, when you think what Jarry in his turn was Up against—the kind of cheap, low pap which amused audiences of the day and, worse, the higher pap churned out by his elders, chief among them Paul Claudel—what is remark- able is the impeturbable good temper with Which he deals out turds and curses. A good temper which was matched last week, with a subtler and rather more scathing sense of humour, by the Czech Theatre on the Balus- trade in -Ubu Roi.
'Le pere Ubu hoscha la p0/re, donc fut nomme par les Aizglois Shakespeare,' noted Jarry in obscure if graceful compliment; and this might have been the motto for Jan Gross- man's enchanting production. Not that Jarry's own views on Elizabethan theatre—cardboard horses, signpost scenery, token armies span- ning the world with dreamlike ease—were much in evidence; rather this production re- calls that celebrated battle scene in Beyond • the Fringe, when, above the ping and pop of cannons and from behind impenetrable puffs of smoke, an unidentified royal voice could be heard dimly and doggedly issuing com- mands of extraordinary complexity : Essex, get thee to Wessex—and Wessex get thee to Sussex . .' We had the same indescribable confusion, the same clanking of weird and cumbrous metal instruments, the same lumber- ing, loutish, muddled fighting men trundling to and fro across the Aldwych stage last week. Only this time the joke was not simply at the expense of the gloom, tedium and discomfort inflicted by innumerable hack Shakespeare productions; it was a grimmer, and more Shakespearian, Czech joke, on the pointless- ness, the misery, tedium and discomfort of politics and war.
No trace here of Jarry's fearsome childish bugbear—Jan Libicek's Ubu is gross, greasy, mindless, ineffectual and, after the manner of political nonentities, invariably triumphant. Obstacles and enemies—the docile Polish armies endlessly marching over the stage and exquisitely drilled in the person of Ladislav Klepal; Jan Preucil as Curislav, delectably slick, sexy and vicious; Oldrich Velen's King Wenceslas and his hulking, draggled, marvel- lously uncouth Tsar of all the Russias —vanish away, clubbed, garotted, exeunt pursued by a purposeful and silken bear. Only Ubu survives this dingy, futile, bloody mess. And it is only when the joke is taken in such earnest that it can be so insouciantly funny : witness, for in- stance, the. Czechs' delicately dim view of Jarry's Russian troops—a gormless gang, per- manently sozzled, sloshing about the stage accompanied by loud coarse bursts from the Red Army choir, or by the four opening chords of Tchaikovsky's piano concerto, abruptly leading to a spurt of gunfire. The whole works obliquely on this apparently guileless level to convey an impression, powerfully felt and minutely organised, of drab confusion. Jarry, who understood and admired though he too seldom practised this kind of deft and slantwise humour, would have been charmed.
Strange to think that Claudel was the older, and produced Le Partage de Midi exactly ten years after Jerry had supposedly exploded the medium. Certainly the play shows signs of des- peration. This is the tale of lovely Yse and strong lonely Mesa ('.le suis sinistre et see), or the Man and the Woman—le male superbe' and la femelle Femme, mere de l'homme'—as they are more commonly called in the text. These two are dogged by death, which seems the recognised price for adultery in this quaint and curiously primitive set-up; and by a per- sistent third man, Amalric, who also mysteri- ously claims to be the Man ('Vous sarez fres bien que . je suis l'hommne'). But he is nought but a brutal braggart—'c'est an hableur brutal' —and gets short shrift. '0 fenune dans mes bras!' cries Mesa, alone at last in a Hong Kong cemetery (there is constant speculation, and considerable doubt, not only as to who is the man but also as to whether he is in fact a man, not to mention the woman and what she is : '0 ,non Mesa, tu n'es plus an homme seulement, mais tu es a moi qui suis une femme./E1 je suis un homme en toi, et tim es une femme avec moi . . .'). However, by dint of patience and frequent reassurance, Mesa finally sorts that one out, the tiresome husband is dispatched to his death with help from a sinister Chinese friend ('mon ami, Ah Fat), and our hero reveals his true masterly self: 'Et je repouse avec un amour impie et avec une parole condaninee.'
The last third of the plot is too absurd to go into here. But from the first two acts it is clear that the gap between Claudel's inflated language and his humdrum plot can only lead to trouble. 'Impious,' damned' are not words which can usefully describe a perfectly ordinary suburban -adultery between a mother of two and a Hong Kong businessman, even in 1906. Especially when there is no attempt whatever • to dignify their sentiments with the suggestion of any psychological quirks or depths, or indeed with any but the most superficial treat- ment of character on much the same level of moral and emotional subtlety as a Hollywood Western.
Jean-Louis Barrault and his amazing corn- pany perform throughout prodigious feats of urbane self-deflation. And, up to a point—up to and including the date in the cemetery— the play can be made to work on these ironic terms. Jean Martinelli as the forceful Amalric, for instance, becomes a portly, suave and genial worldling, a dab hand with the soda syphon', who declaims his grandiose lines with a pleasant, pompous relish followed by an appro- priately loud horse laugh. Jean Desailly as De Ciz, the unwanted husband, turns in a delici- ously subtle study in complaisance and com- plicity. M Barrault himself is sinister enough--a diminutive maniac with red eyes and agile hands—and manages to say so with formid- able conviction. And Edwige Feuillere, moving from plump, dimpled, porcelain flirt to tigerish Virago—and whose mocking, necessary laughter comes in the tremulous spurts and flushes of a schoolgirl, in the silvery, miraculously sus- tained peals of the conscious courtesan or on a note of sudden raucous ferocity—is all women to all three men.
Taking their hint no doubt from the coarse- ness, often enough the sheer vulgarity, of the language, these two turn the seduction in the cemetery into an explicit, elaborately posed and brutal act of copulation. 'Mange moi commune une mangue'—'eat me like a mango'— grunts Yse, straddling her legs in swishing voluminous silk skirts: a gesture at once unequivocal and, because it moves from the un- easy frankness of the language to a harsher and more truthful imaginative level, power- fully exciting. But Claudel's dim religious light, faithfully cast over the last act of this produc- tion, moves in to get them in the end. The effect throughout is something like hearing Pierre Boulez and the Berlin Philharmonic playing a Palm Court selection of old-tyme veletas; or perhaps the execrable music of Don Quixote, which also last week displayed, in language of a portentous silliness to match Claudel's,*a more recent but equally banal and fulsome sentimentality.
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