Sliced life
Peter Jenkins
Ecstasy (Hampstead) Men's Beano (RSC, Warehouse) The Passing Out Parade (Greenwich) Somebody once said that art consisted in leaving things out, or something like that. It helps, perhaps, if a writer can imagine everything about his characters, what they are doing and thinking when off stage, what happened to them before the play began and what happens to them after it has finished, but he doesn't try to put it all on the stage. Plays without writers lack this economy; improvisation is a kind of piecing together what exactly would she do next? — which leaves nothing out: without an author there is no-one to imagine what is being left out. Even when what has been eventually devised is put into disciplined rehearsal the result is still very slow and long — like made up children's plays — and I am doubtful whether it is art. Mike Leigh's latest improvisation is about the bed-sit life of a dim Birmingham girl called Jean who has a job in a selfservice garage, keeps a bottle of gin in her wardrobe and has casual unsatisfactory affairs. She is a sweet, clumsy girl whose life is bleak and dreadfully lonely. The play takes place entirely in her grotty £17-a-week room with kitchen alcove where we first see her after making love with some stray married man. More than half of the play is occupied by a Friday night drinking session which lasts into the early hours and leaves her heaving with desperate tears but at least being comforted by another of life's clumsy innocents, Len, a middle-aged man recently deserted by his Wife.
The characters are depicted with such Photo-realism that they remain in the mind's eye vividly enough, but the play didn't seem to me to be saying anything more than that loneliness is lonely. Sheila Kelley performed the difficult feat of bringing an inarticulate character to convincing life but then, having spent two-and-a-half hours doing it the slow way, suddenly in the Closing moments puts in a spirited defence of the blacks and proceeds sobbingly to explain herself in a fashion which is out of character as well as superfluous. ' Drink seemed to improved the dialogue which in the early stages kept reminding me of overheard crossed-line telephone conversations between Ethel in the stores and Beryl in accounts: 'Suppose I'd better be ringing off.' Long pause. 'Yes. We'd better be ringing off.' Inarticulateness presented realistically is inarticulate just as boredom on the stage is boring. Given these limitations, however, Ecstasy was well done. I found myself becoming caught up in the Slowness of its pace and the thickness of its texture. Students of Irish drinking ought not to miss Stephen Rea's performance as Mick, the deathly life-and-soul of their Friday drinking session. How one longs for them to leave, if only in order to leave the theatre oneself.
Men's Beano is a Warehouse play by Nigel Baldwin. It is scarcely necessary to say more than that. Warehouse productions seem to be becoming more and more predictable, less and less distinguishable one from another, more and more bogged down in the ideas and manners of ten years ago, more and more limited to gratuitous violence as a theatrical cliché, more and more stereotyped in language, and less and less worth seeing. For a tax-supported experi mental theatre it really is becoming something of a disgrace and it is time the old gang was chased out to make way for something new and more talented. Baldwin has some ear for language but scarcely anything to say which hasn't been said a hundred times and better. Men's Beano is aboufa pub outing to Brighton. It is an eight-men-on-a-bus play. A bird is set among the tom cats in the form of a girl hitch-hiker. The day is ruined by two violent and vandalising yobbos. Everything is pre dictable and known. The director, Bill Alexander, is reduced to trying to simulate a television play —what on earth is the point of that in the theatre? — and the talents of a first class company, actors as good as Anthony Higgins, are once again squan dered.
The start of the season at Greenwich is, I fear, a third example of how a mere slice of life, however well observed, is not enough to make theatre. The Passing-Out Parade is a women's army play. It all takes Place in Pontefract in 1944 and we follow the fortunes of an ATS intake through three weeks of square-bashing. One trouble is that there isn't much difference between a women's army play and a men's army play: the sex change is not enough to overcome the cliche. Another difficulty with Anne Valery's play is that she is•not tough enough; she seemed to me to be trying to do for the ATS what Mary O'Malley did for a convent school when she ought to have been cutting nearer to the bone of her subject. Her butch lady sergeant, played by Pat Keen, wasn't terrifying enough and only one of the girls, Private Lil (excellently done by Polly Hemingway) had any real bite to her. The production was given a nostalgic wrapping but wasn't funny or charming enough to score as an episode of Mum's Army nor dramatic enough to be something more. A pity, because it could have been a good subject.
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