REVIEW OF THE ARTS
Kenneth Hurren on the rock of other ages
The new musical, Greose, at the New London, is an evocation not only of the world of the ebullient young of the late 'fifties but of the American teenage scene of that time, which gives it not one but two horrendous levels on which to comment. The writers of the piece, Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey (jointly responsible for book, music and lyrics), operate on both of them with remarkable precision and with an affection that is at once spirited and almost incredible. Their purpose seems to be to celebrate the bizarre and unlovable period of their adolescence — mostly by re-creating with impressive accuracy the rock 'n roll idiom then current — but they have been able to distance themselves from their memories sufficiently to give their nostalgia an engagingly sardonic edge.
From the principle that the best pop music was the stuff that was being written when you were in your teens, it follows that the audiences most likely to be turned on by Grease will be those who were in that fumbling stage between childhood and adultery in 1959. the year in which the item is specifically set; and if you were I'm sorry about that 'turned on '; I meant 'sent '; which seems to have been the vogue expression of the period. There are many such in the show, transporting us back to a time whose survivors probably think of it still as ' wild ' or conceivably ' cool.' Girls, then, were ' chicks ' (I often wonder despondently whether there will ever be a generation that will popularise a synonym for ' girl' that 1 sha. 4te better than ' girl ')
whose dres were slightly below the knee and covered the tops of stockings rather than tights. They seemed extraordinarily awed by their male contemporaries, with their leather jackets and pocket combs, who spoke of them with childish lasciviousness and treated them with over-studied insolence. The late James Dean was a folk hero whose photograph, along with that of Elvis Presley, is prominently featured in the montage that is the principle scenery in Grease. Fashions among pop singers included the dismaying habit of the interpolated aspirate, and youthful admiration for their performances was keenly divided between those who sang of ' lo-hove ' as though simulating a stroke, and those who sought to reinforce the sentiments of their lyrics with some solemnly mushy recitative between choruses.
It becomes difficult, after a certain age, to separate one year from another and to date an era exactly without some personal point of reference, and since nothing of compelling significance happened to me in 1959, a great deal of the above is based on the assumption that the memories of Jacobs and Casey are more pre cise than mine. Their use of the term ' gang-bang ' gave me pause, but I'll take their word for its authenticity. Not that any such activity is portrayed here, the sexuality of their high-school teenagers being generally confined to boastfully crude conversation, although the least fastidious of the girls becomes extremely dejected over the worrying tardiness of her 'friend.' The authors give her a defiant little song at this point called 'There are Worse Things I Could Do,' which can evidently be taken as summarising their approval of a point of view conveyed slightly more elaborately in the plot. The burden of this small contraption is that the young woman to whom I shall groundlessly refer as the romantic heroine is not going to find any happy ending until she relaxes the prim standards of behaviour suitable only for Sandra Dee in the fantasy world of motion pictures (if you're too old to relate to Sandra Dee, think of Doris Day, and if you're too young for either them, I suppose Mary Poppins will do).
The message, I'm afraid, is no more elevating than the conversation but perhaps no less realistic, and a quick look at the way things have gone since 1959 is enough to show that it's all so much spilt milk under the bridge. The exhilarations of Grease are less in its portrayal of a peculiarly charmless generation than its raucously invigorating recapture of its music, heightened almost imperceptibly into parody, and in the enormously zestful spirit in which it is sung and danced by a cast who are largely too old to be playing sixteenand seventeen-yearolds but nevertheless make up in professionalism what they lack in verisimilitude. They include, in case the names mean anything to you, Richard Gere, Peter Armitage, Stacey Gregg and JacquieAnn Carr.
The last-named is the one with the song, There Are Worse Things I Could Do," and it occurred to me a couple of nights later at the Royal Court that one of the worse things the songwriters might have had in mind (but probably didn't) is involvement in illthought-out and thus abortive
' protest ' movements. The striplings in Howard Brenton's play, Magnificence, who think of themselves rather grandly as ' social activists,' embark on an uncomfortable and doomed ' squatting ' operation. They hang a banner from the windows df the empty house they have occupied proclaiming, "We Are the Writing on Your Wall" but no one except the police takes the slightest notice. Brenton, a dramatist prematurely emerged from the Court's Theatre Upstairs and similar wombs for embryonic talents, is plainly depressed by the uselessness of such gestures, and depressed too by the Tory Establishment which — in a diverting interpolation — he caricatures in the persons of two political academics who are also, irrelevantly but doubtless splenetically, homosexuals. Lenin and Cite Guevara are mentioned approvingly else where, and 1 feel sure that Brenton is trying to tell us something that is right on the tip of his tongue. Until he conquers his dramatic speech impediment, I'd almost rather have the trivialities of Who's Who (Fortune) in which Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall are meagrely amusing about the mechanics of adulterous weekends among plastic people; or even the glum sex problems of university students as examined in The Banana Box (Apollo), which at least has Frances de la Tour, torn endearingly between innate gentility and irrepressible concupiscence.
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