Theatre
Blood clot
Kenneth Hurren
Tamburlaine the Great (Olivier, National Theatre)
The Comedy of Errors (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon) Carte Blanche (Phoenix) The National Theatre's main, 'classical' Showcase, the magnificent open-stage Olivier Theatre, opened this week with Peter Hall's own production of Tamburlaine the Great, Parts I and II, a work by Christopher Marlowe that is reputed to have taken a £50,000 bite out of the theatre's costume budget. With an interval of thirty minutes, it takes nearly five hours to perform and is unquestionably one of the great bumnumbing experiences of all time. Fires of rhetoric flare around the edges, and here and there its absurd central figure achieves a certain gory grandeur but, like his author, he is uncommonly given to excess.
After four or five conquests, events take On a deadening predictability. First, some Proud monarch is seen declining to take quite seriously the reports of Tamburlaine's Invincibility; then, swiftly, he learns the hard way as the upstart Scythian shepherd and his henchmen sharpen their swords and descend upon his kingdom, and the episode ends with ruthless indigni4ies heaped upon him: the emperor of the Turks is confined in a cage, when Tam is not using him as a footstool; another brace of rulers are harnessed to their conqueror's chariot 'with bittes in their mouthes' ; a governor is hung in chains above his city's walls to be used for target Practice by Tam's cannon.
Through a large part of this documentation of sadistic and blood-spattered carnage there runs a sort of primitive love interest in that Tamburlaine eventually weds a captured Egyptian maiden, Zenocrate, who takes his fancy quite early in the play as a concubine and to whom his devotion is such that, when at last she dies, he orders the sacking of the city in which the death has occurred. There are three sons of their union, two of whom have every inclination to emulate their father, but the third is something of a milquetoast and recoils fastidiously from the blood-letting. His father cuts his throat, before belching forth d, further stanza of the heroic verse to which he Is apt to give vent between massacres. For 4 peasant barbarian with the general menthality of a baboon, Tamburlaine certainly ..as a Pretty way with words. His invocatrntons to 'divine Zenocrate' swell to verbal usic ('If all the pens that ever poets
hel L d • • •, ), and he follows the slaughter of
tr,ile demure virgins who come to plead for anlaSCUS with the serene poetry of the l'imous 'What is beauty ?' speech.
The characterisation, as you can see, is not marked by any great consistency, and it seems to me that Marlowe grew altogether too fond of his distressing protagonist, taking no disapproving view of his behaviour and, indeed, not only giving him the speeches in which the bombast of the 'mighty line' melted into his finest poetry, but making him the mouthpiece for a few of the atheistic sentiments that brought the wrath of the Elizabethan establishment about his own head. He could not bring himself to visit retribution upon his career-despot, either. When Tamburlaine dies there is a light suggestion that, perhaps, he has been a shade reckless in his challenging insults to Mohammed, but ultimately this seems no more than coincidence. It would have rounded off the drama neatly if he had been put to the sword by Callapine—a zealous young fellow, son of one of his earlier victims—but instead the tyrant succumbs to the plague, pawing a map of the world he has conquered (held upside-down, for of course this extravagant wordsmith cannot read), and the drama dwindles away on a dull, grey tide of anti-climactic rhetoric.
This, and its inordinate length, make me suspicious of Tamburlaine as general entertainment, although it is always fairly spectacular to behold and there are moments in the early stages of Peter Hall's production and Albert Finney's performance when every little shaft of irony is extended close to parody and I thought we might be in for a rather amusing pantomime treatment. Both actor and director soon settle down earnestly to their tasks, though, remembering where they are and what they're about. Finney, whose role is said to be 104 lines longer than Hamlet, copes splendidly with the feat of memory it imposes and, while the part is not one to allow of the subtler nuances of the actor's art, he puts on a gaudy and powerful display of barnstorming. Susan Fleetwood, as Zenocrate, perhaps mildly embarrassed by some of the compliments paid to her ('lovelier than the love of Jove' and the like), is nevertheless also impressive. Denis Quilley and Barbara Jefford, as the caged Turk and his spouse (both, understandably, take leave of their trolleys and beat out their own brains), achieve the only moments when the play seems movingly tragic; Robert Eddison (but who else?) speaks the mellifluous prologues to each half; and if everyone else tends to be rather overshadowed by the monstrous Tamburlaine, they all go about their work efficiently. No one will care much, I suppose, about the liberties taken at Stratford-upon-Avon with The Comedy of Errors. I still cannot rid myself of the notion that the works of Shakespeare at this particular venue should be approached with some feelings of respect and fidelity, but in the case of this dotty little comedy it is hard to pretend that the travesty is of monumental consequence. Although some of the schoolmarmish American matrons were almost nudging each other out from under their hair in shock at seeing the piece as a 'thirties musical set in a Greek square—featuring most notably a rowdy taverna and what looked like a bazaar on the eve of a clearance sale—it seemed to me that they all rather enjoyed the romp. The songs and Zorba-I ike dances that frequently interrupt the proceedings are, in truth, of no great assistance in sorting out the confusions of the plot (it is the one about the two sets of identical twins who, after many years' separation, turn up in the same town and are mistaken for each other all over the place, due largely to the fact that they wear exactly the same clothes) but they do add to the gaiety and sprightliness of the entertainment. Roger Rees displays a fine comic attack as one of the two Antipholuses, Judi Dench is spiritedly vivacious as the wife of the other, and Michael Williams and Nickolas Grace put on a lively double-act as the two Dromios. For my own taste, though, the embellishments in the way of 'business' are somewhat overdone, and I'm afraid that the RSC as clowns, acrobats and song-anddance performers remind me rather of Dr Johnson's remark anent women preachers and dogs walking on their hind legs.
Even so, confronted with their unfamiliar assignments, they make a better stab at them, in a manner of speaking, than the personnel in Carte Blanche do at theirs. This is a sad and witless little revue, to be sure. pretentiously purporting to be doing pioneering work in the sexual liberation movement but more accurately, I should say, designed to liberate its multitude of authors from their own quaint hang-ups and fantasies. I felt almost as though intruding on private griefs and the chances are I would have skipped the second half had it not been that my truancy was likely to be conspicuous in the sparse audience that turned up last Friday. There was also the fact that I was under the close eye of the man from the New Statesman. 'Back,' he said sternly, instinct guiding him to the phrase on the tip of all our tongues, 'to the grind.' Back, then, I went, to be instantly assailed by a dismally unsubtle piece of juvenilia attributed to the seventeenth-century Earl of Rochester and a bleak •poesie de Verlaine' (as ever, chasing Rimbauds) and a further display of miscellaneous pudenda.
This reminds me, incidentally, that I have an apology to make to Paul Raymond and his leading lady, Fiona Richmond, for my suggestion a few weeks ago that their presentation, Come Into My Bed, had closed due to lack of trade. Not so: the reason, I'm told, was that Miss Richmond had to leave the cast because of other commitments. Carte Blanche, it should be said, cannot hold a candle to them in this specialized line of theatrical business.
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