Theatre
Monument to Congreve
By ALAN BRIEN
The Double Dealer. (Lyceum, Edinburgh, last week.)— Breakspear in Gascony. (Gateway, Edinburgh, last week.)—Gammer Curton's Needle and Fratricide Pun- ished. (Lyceum, Edinburgh, this week.)
CONGREVCS Double Dealer is a sex-play trapped in the hangover which followed the intoxication of the Restoration. To his immediate predecessors the dirty joke was still a political gesture, a delib- erately ambiguous V-sign which semaphored both political and marital freedom. The Restoration playwrights were restoring promiscuity as well as monarchy—and Charles 11 was their martyr in both causes. Their dramatic purpose was to sophisticate the new bourgeoisie, to outrage the old Puritans, and to flaunt their smutty epigrams in the face of Obadiah-bind-your-kings-with- chains. Within their lifetime the playhouses had been padlocked, the pleasure gardens blacked out, and adultery made punishable by death. Now they were determined to prove that a Utopia of gal- lantry, a never-never land of lechery, could be built here in London town.
By the tirrtCongreve began to write, the ex- hilaration of defiance had lost its sparkle. The stage trick of presenting seduction as a boring duty rather than an exciting privilege was no longer a novelty. (Nevertheless the difference be- tween the 1690s and the 1920s was not just between Congreve the poet and Coward the not-quite- poetaster. Congreve's Puritan enemy still had a dangerous kick left in him. Coward's had already surrendered and was longing to be shocked out of his suburban apathy. It would be impossible to imagine a James Douglas, or a John Gordon, frightening the gay playwrights of the Twenties the way Jeremy Collier unnerved the Dryden and Congreve with A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage.) Congreve was forced to rely on style, on the poetry of the fashionable, relaxed, uninvolved, amateur gentle- man manner. In The Double Dealer his upper- class tone is still not quite secure. He slips into social Cockneyisms. He drops his artistic aspirates. His moral is a warning against enthusiasm, against passion, and, eventually, against any feeling at all.
Emotion is the hallmark of the democrat, the latitudinarian, the republican. Congreve fills in the gaps with plot. All the wit and the good breeding and the ingenuity he supplies instead cannot pre- vent The Double Dealer from being a polished, chiselled, dead monument to a play.
The Old Vic do not possess the style to make the play seem alive in the shifting, hypnotic glare of the footlights. By style I mean that ability to be at once both the character and the actor, to evoke both a subjective identification with the role and an objective appreciation of the technique. The cast are all the while still getting to know each other. This is a method which can be electrifying in a rough, raw contemporary drama but which is unsatisfying in a smooth, polished, cut-glass classic. Only Maggie Smith as Lady Pliant and Moyra Fraser as Lady Froth convey the correct feeling of talented actresses who have transformed themselves into lifelike marionettes. John Justin as the hero Mellefont is far too alive for his part and forces us to judge him as a human being. As such, he has to be condemned as an amiable schemer, an ingratiating nonentity on the fringes of a cruel web of practical jokes. Miles Malleson and Alec McCowen as peripheral coxcombs are entertainingly vacuous. But Mr. Malleson only occasionally, and Mr. McCowen never, allows us to glimpse the double vision of Congreve's half- sympathetic, half-satirical eye-view of high society. As the double dealer himself, the jumped- up bounder who is too clever for the patrons who have advanced him, Donald Houston is almost in style. A little more conscious lagoism, a little more bloody-mindedness, in his natural ambition; a little more hollow politeness and dancing-master ease in his false gentlemanliness and he will have achieved as good a compromise style as can be kindled in an ad hoc company adrift in an artificial comedy. The whole evening ends up by being an enjoyably dated pantomime with stretches of naked boredom while the stage-hands change the plot.
Breaks pear in Gascony is an uneasy marriage between a nephew of Shaw and niece of Fry. Set in an age which like today (and every other age in history) is an age of transition, it is an attempt to plot an ironic counterpoint between then and now, between the cannon and the H-bomb, the
IIE SPECTATOR. SEPTEMBER 4, 'chemist and the scientist, the merchant and the Pitalist, the Manichaean and the materialist. is Linklater is too intelligent to be dull. He is ISO too conventional to be disturbing. His cont- ents on sex and society and responsibility and lief and nationality are just unusual and evocative enough to bring a pleased, self-con- atulatory laugh from a middle-brow audience. is diluted-Romantic, water-colour poetic images eft on the verge of revelation and dissolve before Y can be written down. Breaks pear in Gascony a ghost-play fashioned from the left-over ecto- 14sin of better dramatists. In précis before the vent, in recollection afterwards, it promises much °re than it ever delivered in performance. It was played by the Perth Theatre Company the traditional way of good repertory corn- nies—that is, so that we feel we know the actors °re intimately as people than we do as charac- rs. In order to convey that for the moment they e not the man we have seen in the pub, or the nrnan in the shop, they attempt to dress up in rformances too heavy or too tight or too casual nr their measurements. But every note is sus- 4ined too long, every smile begins to fray at the ciges, every gesture starts to spread into a cramp. 00 experienced to be dismissed as doing well in difficult part, they now do difficultly in an easy one, The Birmingham Rep. have displayed perverse °urage in attempting to revive two old plays i Inch are as far beyond artificial as they are • „Yund natural respiration. It is hard to believe , qi'llt rummer Gluten's Needle was not thought to Prehistoric Mummerset clowncry even in 1575. Ike an Edwardian newsreel, like a Victorian dvertisement, it awakes an idle antiquarian 1m,Inusernent for about ten minutes. I am grateful n be reminded that here was the first usage of the ti radifional admonition—'Thou would'st lose thy pleasure an' it were loose.' I found a mild professional l'easure in watching how an energetic producer and an acrobatic cast could fill in the cracks be- tween t ' the excretory jokes in rocking-horse-metre ri°11Plels. I laughed at the way John Carlin in a able part as the bailiff's bodyguard was be with nods and becks and toothy twitches to De twice as funny as the entire dialogue put to- gether. But I am not surprised that its author, such S., Master of Arts,' should have taken posterity, care to keep his identity uncertain for vesterity. b The second half of the programme is alleged to w be u Post-Elizabethan version of Hunt/or remem- ered by strolling players in Germany when faced faith sudden request for Master Shakespeare's 4.111°Lis thriller. Here, too, ten minutes of it is laceePtable as ludicrous burlesque of Shakespear- 01 convention and Shakespearian acting robbed bi Shakespeare's verse. The first time some mem- ber of the Danish court says 'What have you °eine?' in a Grand Gingold voice upon discovering ane of Young Hamlet's messy murders, it is worth
giggle. When the Queen justifies her second
arriage by explaining, 'If the Pope had not o yowed the marriage it would never have taken :nee,' it is possible to see that the players had that a point. But eventually I refused to believe that this was a genuine unvamped transcript of any , .rious acting version. There were too many con- 4ously planned anti-climaxes ('I will return to the `ing----to his horror'), too many colloquialisms
I
(`My poppet, my pet'), too many mock under- statements (`There's a ghost comes here every quarter of an hour'). It is difficult to imagine that any actors who had ever appeared in Hamlet could reproduce it without even one of the famous quotations or one of the memorable cue lines. Played fast and straight by first-rate actors as if they meant every word, Fratricide Punished might be a passable divertissement. Played by good actors of the second rank hamming away like the Crazy Gang and camping every line, it became a pointless bore. So far the Edinburgh Festival has been more Edinburgh than Festival. At least the city will never be brought to London.
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