THEATRE

Intruders

KENNETH HURREN

As soon as I laid eyes on the stage set for Stanley Eveling's play, Mister, at the Duchess, I knew we'd all have a hard time trying to catch the drift of the thing above the tinkle of symbols. That seedy,

cluttered basement, crammed with the nau- tical paraphernalia of a bygone day, the flyblown remnants of our island heritage, had jaded allegory as much as faded glory writ large all over it.

The subsequent appearance of the hire- lings seemed to provide glum confirmation. Tom, the tenant of the place, is a former merchant seaman with a brave seafaring record, now dealing in junk, sharing the accommodation with a more ancient mariner, both of them evidently personify- ing a Britain long past her best; their asso- ciates, a comically garrulous Scot and a dangerously handsome West Indian, fell into place as representatives of quirky separatists and the emergent strength of.. former _col- onies. I didn't, truth to tell, make any great sense of the play within these terms of reference, but it may be kinder to cling to the theory—blaming its lack of impact on my own obtuseness--than to consider only the face value of the work. On the latter basis. I should be bound to call it a very foolish and pretentious exercise indeed. Such plot as there is revolves around the arrival in the menage described of a plump and generously sensual young woman from Bradford, said to be the daughter of an old shipmate of Tom's. Invited to stay, she at once sets about stirring Tom's libido, but without much success, for he tends to be pretty sniffy about any kind of unseemliness. As well as being neurotically obsessed with the past, and especially with the heroic ges- tures of men like Nelson (of whom there is a full-dress effigy on the premises), he is also fond of reading and quoting romantic poetry, not to mention the Bible. There ensues an elaborate effort to paint the intruder as a latterday Emma Hamilton, and it looks as though she might have Tom made when she puts on a gown of that lady's period (which is unearthed among the junk) and persuades him to dress up as Nelson. Even under these encouraging conditions, though, Tom's re- sponse is frustratingly inadequate, and the girl, after spurning the cheerful advances of the Scot, looks likely to take up with the West Indian.

I found myself wholly incredulous of all these goings-on, but Mr Eveling—who is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh—may, as already hinted, be fry-

ing bigger fish than squalid sexual man- oeuvres in a dilapidated basement. Apart from the putative imperial allegory, he shows a certain philosophical concern with the nature of courage, which he somehow relates

to sexual impotence, but the matter is pur-

sued with such dubious rhetorical airiness that I had little confidence in his conclusions.

Whatever it is he had it in mind to say, his handling of his material is somewhat want- ing in tidiness and lucidity, and it is, on the whole, a dispiriting evening. Freddie Jones (who seems willing to have a crack at any kind of nut) does his best to find a kernel of sympathy and sensibility in Tom, and Delia Lambert is valiantly cheerful and sexy as the voluptuous temptress.

The problem confronting Richard and Joanna Howarth, two of the central char- acters in Simon Gray's play, Spoiled, at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, is more easily defined, and there is no doubt it's a dilly. It would tax, and I daresay defeat, the experi- enced sagacity of a consortium of marriage guidance counsellors, but the artist can some- times come up with the flash of insight that eludes the orthodox journeyman, so it is a valid matter for dramatic investigation.

Here's how the Howarths' trouble lines out. They have had a weekend house guest— a comely youth, taking his o-levels rather belatedly and receiving some last-minute cramming in French—and Richard, who may have been grappling with ambiguous sexual feelings for some time, suddenly gets a big surge of desire for the lad. The schoolmaster is pretty shattered by the guilt and anguish of this self-discovery; and Joanna is shat- tered, too, for she has come upon her spouse emerging from the boy's bedroom in circum- stances that leave her in no doubt as to what has occurred. She has, perhaps, had vague previous hints of Richard's incipient pro- clivities, but they have been far from con- clusive and she has been prepared to attri- bute recent connubial disappointments to the fact that she is grossly pregnant and tempor- arily a bit short on seductive appeal. Neglect, however, is one thing; betrayal is another.

If you should be intrigued to know how Richard and Joanna cope with the situation, don't look at me; and I'm afraid it won't do you much good to look at Spoiled, either, for no sooner has Mr Gray reached this disturb- ing moment of domestic truth than he brings down the final curtain. I cannot legitimately upbraid him for not being Henrik Ibsen, but I should be less inclined to criticise him for ducking the knotty emotional problem he has set up for his characters if the route by which he had brought them to this pass were marked by wayside fascinations of compel- ling interest. I fear they are rarely even plau- sible. The boy intruder, for example, first established as a surreptitious reader of girlie magazines, is portrayed as quite genuinely shocked by a revelation that a chum with whom he shares an enthusiasm for cycling was suspected of homosexuality at school. While all this is doubtless intended to in- crease the impact of the poorly contrived bedroom scene, its actual effect is to reduce its conviction quite fatally, unless we attri: bute a wicked and equally implausible touch of guile to a boy we have been led to regard as dim but essentially innocent.

Simon Ward, who is now embarked on his second or third generation Of teenagers, plays the lad with careful sensitivity, but the con- tradictions of the character defeat him in the end. Jeremy Kemp, in a performance of notable subtlety, conveys much of Richard's inner torment, and Anna Massey, as Joanna, is wry, touching and—despite having the aspect of a portly turtle—even decorative.

The eponymous Ellen in Peter Ransley's play at Hampstead Theatre Club is one of two intruders upon the Kensington house- hold of a young writer (roughish but kindly) and his wife (genteel but sexually vibrant) who have a marital problem that is rooted less in their ostensible incompatability than in the husband's apparent sterility. The other intruder is the husband's erstwhile chum, an artist who also has a problem— creative in his case—and we soon get round to the suggestion that the two men were only functioning properly when both were cosily involved in a menage a trois with some girl in the Midlands. It is clear that be- fore the evening is out, this pattern is' going to be repeated, with the writer's wife the not unwilling third party.

As with Mr Gray's piece, I felt that a more interesting situation—an updated version of Coward's Design for Living—was shaping up at curtain-fall, but in Mr Ran- sley's case I have fewer complaints with the preliminaries. He has a subsidiary theme—having to do with the dubiety of society's arrangements for the mentally sick —pursued through the experiences of both the artist and Ellen, a tatterdemalion ancient who habitually camps out on the steps out- side the house, but is eventually persuaded to come inside. All this is neatly integrated; perhaps a shade too neatly, for Ellen—who claims to have led a remarkably gay and un- conventional life in her younger days—has also some vivacious menage a trois memories. The patness of the counterpoint gives a touch of puppetry to Mr Ransley's characters, but they're beautifully played : by Ian McShane, Richard Kane and Maria Aitken in the triangular set-up, and especially by the veter- an Mary Merrall who is marvellously and memorably good as the old lady, bright-eyed as a squirrel with her hoard of nostalgia-nuts, sweetly erotic and ineffably sad.