• ARTS • LETTERS • MONEY• LEISURE THEATRE
Man in the irony mask
KENNETH HURREN
I have bad news for Tony Palmer, the sub- terranean correspondent of this journal. Out in the country over the weekend, it was several times urged upon me that the honour of my trade demanded some re- buttal of what were thought to be his testy objurgations of last week : from which he can take it, I'm afraid, that the comic irony of his notes was lost on most readers beyond the Shaftesbury Avenue purlieus.
The trouble with that kind of writing is that there will always be those who don't get the joke. I should have thought myself that anyone who had ever read one of those attacks mounted upon theatre critics every now and then by aggrieved authors, irate impresarios or disgruntled actors would have spotted instantly that Palmer was writing a chimerical parody of such an attack, pulling himself, it seemed, in the Position of some misguided investor in a turkey called Child's Play. Evidently I was wrong.
To some extent f can see why. The very choice of play on which the parody was hung seemed at first sight a broad enough hint of what Palmer was up to; but this, of course, depended upon the reader's having seen it and thus being aware of What a wretched and pretentious little mel- odrama it is, and clearly the last play in London to be chosen as a base for a serious assault on critics who had reviewed it adversely. You have to spell things out les esoterically than that, Tony, if you're to tickle ribs in the Hertfordshire bush and Yvonne Mitchell in 'Children of the Wolf' on the chicken farms of Dorset.
You tried, though. I'll give you that, baby. The Clive Barnes bit was clever: quoting him at the outset as the man whose insensitiveness to the virtues of 'a tine comedy' had more or less killed it, and then—having so precisely established your disdain for' his opinions—bringing him back as tongue-in-cheek evidence against reviewers who were indifferent to the thrills of Child's Play.. I suppose it was too clever, too waspishly subtle—except for the cognoscenti who know of the low esteem in which Barnes is held in New York theatrical circles.
The tongue must not only be in the cheek but be seen to be in the cheek (see?), and be so seen immediately—or the most bliss- fully ironic touches are apt to strike the bewildered reader as some strange vag- rancy of mind. I think that's what hap- pened pretty generally, Tony, with your piece last week. Your amusingly trans- parent pretence of being a critic yourself, for instance; and the deliberately meaning- less invective (I was wild, about 'baggy- trousered adolescents' and 'apolOgetic freaks'); the irrelevant facetiousness ('in the States at the prospect of an English accent all minds and legs are opened'); most of all, perhaps, the deadpan way in Which you associated Child's Play with such thoughtful works as Death of a Sales- man and Inherit the Wind: all these, you probably thought, were carefully planted giveaways to your mocking mood. You'd be surprised—and, I expect, saddened— to know how often I've had to explain that all those drivelling comments weren't meant to he taken seriously. Even at that. there were the sardonic sceptics who wanted to have it both ways and came back at me with various forms of Samuel Butler's line about the most perfect humour and irony being generally quite unconscious. (1 wonder . .. no, couldn't be.) Enough of such foolery. Now I shall have to postpone comment on the opening of the new Stratford-upon-Avon season until next week: and I should not have come so lengthily to Palmer's rescue were-I not cer- tain that there would be a future oppor tunity to discuss Peter Nichols's new play, Forget-Me-Not Lane, presently available at the Greenwich Theatre butunquestion- ably destined for the West End (with, I hope, its cast, led by Anton Rodgers and Michael Bates, intact). As in all Nichols's work, ruefulness and risibility go hand in hand. A man who has found compassion- ate humour in the predicament of parents with a spastic child (Joe Egg), and has 'moved wild laughter in the throat . of death' in a geriatric ward (The National Health), has no difficulty in making merry with the pains of a crumbling marriage; and his protagonist's compulsive picking at his emotional scar tissue is imbedded in
a vaudeville collage of comedy and nostal- gia as diverting as it is perceptive:
Children of the Wolf, newly incum- bent at the Apollo following its .premiere at the Dublin Festival, might be taken as a cautionary tale for reluctant mothers who abandon the infants they have failed to have aborted, or perhaps as a grim argument for euthanasia in cases where lack of oxygen causes natal brain damage; but the chances are that the author, John Peacock, is just trying his hand at a pop version of the Theatre of Cruelty. The kids he offers us—almost but not quite aborted, and almost but not quite suffo- cated at birth—are twins, a boy and a girl, insane and probably incestuous, who cele- brate their twenty-first birthday by enticing the woman who -bore them and promptly deserted them to a rendezvous in the gloomy old . house, cobWebbed and decay- ing, where she once made free with her lover. Agreeable though it is• to have Yvonne Mitchell back in the theatre, it is distressing to find her in this preposterotts situation : her instinctive sensibility sub dues some of the more extravagant reac- tions that Mr Peacock seems to have had in mind for the terror-stricken mum. once the twins get sadistically busy on their luridly retributive plans, but the tactless- ness of some of the lines would defeat any actress in the world, and she has no control over the grisly denouement which made me wonder why the manage- ment hadn't provided retching bags.
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