Theatre
Sobering Up
By BAMBER GASCOIGNE
A Penny for a Song. (Ald- wych.)—The Empire Buil- ders. (Arts.) IN its original version, as directed by Peter Brook in 1951, John Whiting's A Penny for a Song could be described as a Pimm's among plays— ideal for a summer evening, sweet, cool, suffused with exotic herbiage and deceptively light. The material was simple. A family of English eccen- trics made ludicrous preparations one day in 1804 for the arrival of Napoleon's invasion force; and during the same day a stranger arrived, turned the daughter of the house head over heels in love, and departed again. The hidden kick that is essential to a Pimm's came from a certain seriousness at the play's core. It was a vague, romantic, idealistic seriousness, deriving from several wistful-wise aphorisms about love and from the central love affair. The stranger was a blind soldier on a futile but magnificent journey to ask George III to stop the war—a pilgrimage which was acceptable both as a symbol for idealism and as a reason for leaving the lovelorn daughter, Dorcas, at the end. There was nothing harsh to break the play's tone of wistful charm. Seriousness and frivolity were all of one piece.
John Whiting has now revised the love affair for this revival at the Aldwych. The stranger is no longer blind and he is going up to London to agitate for social reform; he quotes Tom Paine and demonstrates that his eccentric hosts are parasites on society. His life is still an idealistic one (though not now entirely admirable to his author) but it is no longer general enough to be an acceptable symbol. It is particular, familiar, controversial; it raises precise issues far too weighty for this play to carry. Is the stranger right, for example, to desert Dorcas for his work of reform? The tug between responsibility to
society and to individuals has been the centre of numerous plays. but it remains a very real
problem and one that is far too spiky for the
whimsical context of A Penny for a Song. It un- balances the play so severely that all the fooling
about with Heath Robinson fire engines and the emphasis on Olde Englishe Eecentricitie now seem intolerably superfluous. However, the pulse of the comedy quickens every time Judi Dench frisks on to the stage as an entrancing Dorcas; Newton Bliek is very funny as the dumb-witted lookout man perched in a tree; and there is a magnificent silent performance by Henry Woolf as a militiaman, staring about with the vacant leer of a figure out of Hieronymus Bosch.
When an avant-garde playwright dumps one dominant symbolic object on his stage, he should ideally achieve two things: the object should become an acceptable symbol for a whole range of loosely related experiences; and yet it should also be able to be treated quite naturalistically by the characters in the play. That sounds un- duly pompous, but lonesco's Amedee will clarify what I mean. The famous growing corpse in that living room could represent any type of mounting obsession, yet it is treated by the married couple quite straightforwardly as a very embarrassing corpse.
The object in the living-room in Boris Vian's
The Empire Builders is a mouldy ragged creature
called a Schmurz. It soon establishes itself as every conceivable type of repression (repression of the truth about this family's relationships, of Algeria by France, and so on) and it therefore answers the First Condition of all Objects. It is less satisfactory on the second. The characters don't respond to it naturally. They frequently beat it and jab at it, but they tend to do so when- ever such gestures will have 'meaning' (as when they have just disregarded some unpleasant truth) rather than when they might literally assault such a blob of glup in the living-room. They are too visibly the tools of the author's intentions.
Nevertheless the play holds. There are electri- fying moments as the family retreats higher and higher up the house to avoid facing reality. The cast is good, and David Jones's direction excel- lently clear. I found that the play collapsed in the last act, a long soliloquy by the husband alone with the Sehmurz, but Hugh Burden had lost his voice the night I went. He had been ex- tremely good in the quieter patches and others have found the ending the most powerful part of the play—so my impression may have been peculiar to that night.
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