Theatre

All That Glisters

By BAMBER GASCOIGNE The Alchemist. (Old Vic.)

THE enraging experience of The Alchemist, by Sir Tyrone Guthrie, subsides slowly. Even now, four days after the event, my fingers are driving the letters through the shredding ribbon with quite unnecessary

force. The great pity of it is that here were a director and a cast who could between them have achieved a marvellous pro- duction of a marvellous play. They were pre- vented from doing so by Guthrie's almost idiotic idea of what makes drama seem 'relevant' to a modern audience.

He argues in a programme note that 'trad- itionalists' like seeing old plays in period costume because it makes the plays seem quaint, delightful and totally irrelevant to the distress- ing realities of our everyday modern lives. He also said in an interview in The Times. that modern audiences don't know enough about the Jacobean age to understand Jonson's play properly in its original form. Personally I dis-

agree with both these assertions, though I grant that a case can be made out for altering a word here and there when the meaning is no longer generally familiar and when the poetry will not suffer from the change—Guthrie, for example, alters loadstone' to `magnet' in a sentence where the whole joke would be lost on anyone not

knowing

what a loadstone is. There is also an

obvious case for anyone who wishes to rewrite such a play completely, turning it into a comedy which a twentieth-century Ben Jonson might have written. But this task does require a twen- tieth-century Ben Jonson.

Guthrie's alterations fall precisely between these two valid extremes. He makes no change in the core of the play, in its plot or character- isation, but he plays merry havoc with the peri- pheral details—chiefly in order to accommodate his beloved twentieth-century costumes. The ludicrous split in his approach is revealed, un- wittingly, in his own programme note. He argues that there is nothing `unreal' today about the idea of people believing in the Philosopher's Stone, which will turn base metal into gold: and to proveh. ; s point he quotes some relations of

his who gave all their money to a charming Young trickster who promised to invest it in a gold mine of fabulous prospects. Here Guthrie's argument is precisely right. He admits that we, like him, can make the imaginative lump in the theatre from an ancient to a mod- ern type of gulling (and indeed our twentieth- century Ben Jonson might well choose a specu- lative stockbroker as his central character for The Alchemist). Yet a couple of lines later Guthrie is solemnly explaining that to give the _Play its full twentieth-century significance he has had to change 'coach and six' to 'limousine.' Does he seriously think, if we can see a stockbroker in an alchemist, that it will be be- yond us to link a coach and six with a limousine? What is, of course, extremely hard to see is any- . ne using a limousine to visit an alchemist; and because of this dichotomy almost every one of Guthrie's alterations makes for unreality where ofnson offered reality. How great is the reality of a modern lawyer's clerk who is proud of being able to 'court his mistress out of Ovid'? Where is the reality in a twentieth-century

youth who wants to set up a grocery for the sale of tobacco and chemical distillations? Even Sir Epicure Mammon's boast-1 will have all my beds blown up, not stuft: Down is too hard' —sounds a little feeble in the Dunlopillo age.

But the chief victims of Guthrie's imagina- tion are Kastril and his sister, Dame Pliant. In Jonson, Kastril is a young provincial nouveau riche, with £3,000 a year, who wants to learn the proper etiquette of quarrelling so that he can become one of 'the angry boys' and 'live by his wits' in gallant London society. He has brought along his sister to try and get her married to a peer. This is entirely real today, in spirit though not in detail (and the etiquette of quarrelling is still very funny—certainly Touchstone always gets plenty of laughs with it in As You Like It), but Guthrie doggedly turns Kastril into a creature of the purest fan- tasy. He now has £20,000 a year. yet he arrives in a black leather motor-cycling suit and a crash helmet. The quarrelling has had to be cut (thus also missing a lot of the humour of a later scene), and all that Kastril now wants of the learned doctor is to be provided with a flick- knife. He still brings his sister to be married to a peer, but she too is dressed in crash helmet, black trousers and baggy black sweater covered in badges. Yet in spite of her repulsive appear- ance the only two genuine 'gentlemen' in the play are both eager to marry her. What would seem to have happened is that Tyrone Guthrie has made the one very superficial link between `angry boys' and 'teddy boys,' and everything else has had to tag along as best it can or else drop out altogether. Yet surely our own imagina- tions, while watching Jonson's play, could make better connections than this? Can there seriously be anyone who would find Guthrie's Kastril and Dame Pliant as 'real' or `relevant' as Jonson's?

Of all Elizabethan or Jacobean dramatists Jonson is probably the one who will suffer most from the Guthrie treatment. The Alchemist contains many more precise references to con- temporary life and manners than any of Shakespeare's plays, and also many more re- marks about the precise appearance of other characters in the play. This fact forces Guthrie to cut out many of the best passages. To give only one example: when Jonson's Surly arrives in disguise as a Spanish count, he nat- urally wears a magnificent great ruff. Guthrie's Surly (Peruvian now, for no apparent reason) comes in a natty white suit, so a magnificent speech has to be cut where Ananias, the Puritan, sees the dago Surly and says:

Avoid, Sathan !

Thou art not of the light: That ruff of pride About thy neck betrays thee: and is the same With that which the unclean birds, in seventy- seven,

Were seen to prank it with on divers coasts.

This is splendidly funny, and provides an ex- cellent touch of characterisation for Ananias as well as a nice satirical comment on the logical processes of the Puritan mind. The speech is sacrificed solely to make straight the way for a bunch of twentieth-century costumes. If any- one should argue that the allusion would be lost on a modern audience, unaware that the mating of birds had been observed in seventy-seven, the answer is that Jonson's original audience were equally unaware (if indeed any actual event is being alluded to), since the play was first per- formed thirty-three years after 1577.

There are many minor mysteries about Guthrie's changes. Why, for instance, does he multiply Kastril's fortune by seven, yet leave the sums paid by the Puritans at Jonson's

original figure? Or why, except for a cheap laugh, is the lawyer's golden coin changed from one 'that my love gave me' to one 'which my mother kept in a tea-pot on the kitchen dresser'? The same lawyer produces from his pocket (not this time in place of anything Jonsonian, but as a free bonus), a season ticket to Grove Park.

The night I went these modernisms amused the audience more than anything else in the production. So, on this level, Guthrie's inven- tions do work. Yet people laugh when they see or hear anything familiar in any type of play, whether it be a mention of the football pools, Barbara Moore or the Palladium, or the sight of a teddy boy in a crash helmet. The incon- gruity of such things in an 'old' play adds an extra bit of merriment, and one would un- doubtedly be amused by the general spirit of this production if it were a Christmas show put on by the employees of a large shop, or by a battalion in the army. But has it all any- thing to do with that eagerly pursued, alchemical ingredient of drama—`relevance' to life? A play begins to be relevant when it is true in its own context. It becomes fully relevant when that truth holds good for other parallel contexts. Pompously and insistently, I repeat that Ben Jonson's play does both these things and Sir Tyrone Guthrie's neither.

Sometimes. but for me not often, the boister- ousness of the production and the qualities of the cast rose above all the faults. Particularly good is Charles Gray as Sir Epicure Mammon— admittedly the richest and most indestructible character of them all, but Mr. Gray, looking like someone out of Toulouse-Lautrec, gives him the wonderfully decadent air of a gross fin-de-siecle hedonist, as he catalogues the sordid pleasures of his future wealth. Leo McKern as Subtle and Lee Montague as Face keep the pace brisk acrd are excellent foils to each other. And Priscilla Morgan's Dol Common catches to a turn the boredom of prostitution. But, in spite of all these, an evening of very high promise and hope ended, I found, in almost total disaster. I feel free to end with a pun almost as atrocious as Sir Tyrone Guthrie's inventions, by saying that in the Waterloo Road, if not in Westminster Abbey, `rare Ben Jonson' can more literally be described as saignant.