Theatre
Essays in Recognition By ALAN BRIEN ONE of the least remarked, yet most remarkable, differences between a play and a film lies in the effect the audience has upon the players. I remember reporting a rock-and-roll riot in a suburban cinema where a dull film kept unrolling on the screen, insulated from the intoxication it had provoked, and smearing its shadowy, refrigerated images across the blurred figure of the manager, who appealed, like a miniature Lord Montagu, for British decency and fair play. But in the theatre, a cough or a guffaw, a belch or a groan, can change the whole rhythm and tone of the action by its unruly syncopation. Much ef the sheer theatrical impact of the Arnold Wesker trilogy on stage lies in its unnerving ability to embarrass the audience without para- lysing the actors. The end of Act H in Roots, where Beatie Bryant dances her puppyish parody 01 a corny ballet, the middle of Act III of I'm Talking About Jerusalem, where the father and mother mime the child's version of the creation of humanity, are both blush-making, goose- pimpling assaults on middle-brow sophistication. Here are people who are also performers flayed of their everyday skins and obliged to appear in their raw flesh before a rag-bag public of paying customers. Mr. Wesker's success in the theatre so far has only incidentally depended upon his knack of presenting political animals in a state of grace and disgrace. What stirs and prickles his audience is the sight of half-domesticated creatures exposed in the intimacy of their domes- tir lives—as if we were obliged to eavesdrop on the interior monologue of a cat in labour, or a frustrated dog.
It is a mistake to hail Mr. Wesker first as the socialist-realist, then to condemn him as the socialist-romantic. His political opinions, like most political opinions, are mainly accidental. What this trilogy seems to be saying is—look at this chapter of accidents and see how someone very like me could shuffle the pages of his development out of sequence. Here are people doing the wrong things for the right reasons. Here are betrayals through love and sacrifices through selfishness and cruelty through idealism. It is almost immaterial whether the aims are cap- able of being realised or the ambitions of being fulfilled. The three plays are about the failure of three different methods of propaganda. Mutual education is the theme—in Chicken Soup it is political, in Roots cultural and in I'm Talking About Jerusalem sociological. In the last, cur- rent production, a former YCL Valkyrie and an ex-Achilles of the International Brigade re- treat to the country during the first flush of the 1945 Labour Government to produce hand- made furniture and live the life of the en- lightened Middle Ages. Hope after hope Is aborted—the free-and-easy manners of the fac- tory grate against the assumptions of the feudal- and-difficult farm. The idealistic camaraderie of the forces is debased into the cynical indivi- dualism of the civvy street. Hand-made crafts- manship turns out to be a subversive luxury in the era of mass-production for the Welfare State market. Each of these defeats is docu- mented with humour and compassion and only a critic infatuated with agit-prop would imagine that Mr. Wesker is offering these' rebuffs as symbols of the rout of Socialism.
Yet the Wesker Trilogy somehow obstinately refuses to jell as three elevations of a house divided against itself. Partly this is because the drawings are not made to the same scale. Roots iA the only one in which the author has withdrawn sufficiently to avoid including his own shadow in the picture. Its theme is the least political yet the most urgent—how can we persuade the masses to avoid enriching the adulterators who debauch them with trivialities? It is a slow, pains- taking play which' only takes shape and sig- nificance when it is seen backwards from the final curtain. But then it displays the solidity and rest of an almost perfect small masterpiece. It somewhat underestimates that genuine culture of the working classes which is non-intellectual —there is too little of the fun of darts and foot- ball, the satisfaction of cooking and gardening, the devotion to pigeon breeding and story telling. (This may be a racial inhibition: it is very diffi- cult for a Jew to be integrated in a working-class household.) But Mr. Wesker never makes the mistake of over-weighting his case to suit his con- victions. Mrs. Bryant's stubborn anchorage in her own simple satisfactions is well suggested between the lines of the dialogue and the acting Her daughter's final speech is pitiful as a mani festo but exhilarating as the first outburst of a dumb girl who has just learned to speak her mind.
I'm Talking About Jerusaletn, though more coherent than Chicken Soup With Barley, is equally entangled with autobibgraphy. The characters seem to have been inefficiently edited out of life. Moments of tremendous vitality and truthfulness alternate with stretches of false sentiment and turgid •abuse. Partly this is the fault of the production and the performances, though it cannot be entirely a coincidence that the director John Dexter and his team are so successful with Roots and so ill-at-ease in the other plays. But, whatever the reason, convic- tion sags when characters who have supposedly been trained from childhood in dialectics pro- nounce the word 'Socialism' 'with all the familiarity with which I would enunciate 'Bi- Metallism.' The beginning and end of the Trilogy betray signs of incomplete unification—the daughter and son-in-law who have exiled them- selves in the Cotswolds in the first, turn up in Norfolk in the third. In Jerusalem, an old armY chum appears who has achieved the extra- ordinary feat of being married in 1946, and divorced, remarried and separated again by 1941 But the key to the latest Wesker play is 'Jerusa- lem.' The failure is a failure to redesign and re- build a personal way of living for a family within the dense, octopus structure of mechanised socictY. It is only a temporary setback, but an essential and inevitable one. The trilogy ends with a family, all in their own ways, on the verge of fac- ing reality for the first time. Freedom is the recognition of necessity—as Ronnie undoubtedly learned at his father's knee. These three plays are essays in recognition as winch for the audience as for the characters. it is a good, and valuable, lesson, even if the teacher does not.always seem to have done his own homework all the time.
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