Enter a Free Man (St Martin's)
THEATRE
Invisible man
HILARY SPURLING
Tom Stoppard is a curious phenomenon. Last year we had his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in which, by an ingenious twist, Shakespeare's two nonentities took the stage to reveal at startling length a fairly meagre acquaintance with the fashionable playwrights of the past ten years. And, proceeding in the same by now familiar manner, he gave us Enter a Free Man last week, which shows every sign so far of repeating its predecessor's astonishing success. Here Mr Stoppard again performs his vanishing trick, only this time the influence of the smarter continentals is re- placed by a sample of recent and more humdrum native talent.
Leaning heavily on Robert Bolt's Flowering Cherry, and taking his • germ perhaps from early memories of Tod town, Mr Stoppard has constructed a token plot: an irascible inventor, leaving home for fame and fortune in Act 1, steps across to the pub to market his latest and most brilliant invention; and returns home a beaten man in Act 2, because no one in the pub would buy it. This invention is an envelope with gum on both sides of the flap. At home he has another—some funnels connected by string rigging to the roof for watering pot plants. In a moment of particularly bitter and pitiless exposure, his wife asks him to tidy up this mess. But, at curtain fall in a scene of poignant reconciliation, his daughter tenderly collects the drip in buckets. Such is the brutality of real life, such the searing pathos
of illusion, in the'English theatre since Dear Brutus.
Or so it seems from the agonised hush, the hysteria and powerfully laboured breathing with which Frith Banbury, who directs, has infested this production. The dialogue goes slowly, as in this speech of Mother's: 'When he was young—he was—proud . . . You want to know what he was like—he was--a gentle- man' The pace is a trifle brisker in the pub, more apparently from nervous embarrassment than from any conscious plan. Megs Jenkins and Vanessa Forsyth, as mother and daughter, make sadly heavy going; and Michael Hordern as the inventor does some small, bold things, but only in the first ten minutes.
The affair Stoppard, in short, grows more and more mysterious. A play from which the author is notoriously absent is followed next year' by another, written four years earlier, which is an almost perfect vacuum. Or, as the poet has it: 'As I was going up the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. Hi wasn't there again today. I wish to God he'd go away.'
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