Theatre
The General from America (Stratford Swan) The White Devil (Stratford Swan) Paint Your Wagon (Open Air, Regent's Park)
Rich, rare and remarkable
Sheridan Morley Closing the current RSC season of new Productions at Stratford before the director Adrian Noble awards himself an unprece- dented personal season of his own Chem Orchard and A Midsummer Night's Dream running alone there all through October, Richard Nelson's The General from Ameri- ca is a rich, rare and remarkable triumph on the Swan stage. One of the RSC's more intelligent decisions, in a regime now racked by redundancy fears at the Barbican and a curious kind of lassitude at Stratford, is the continuing adoption of Nelson as its American house dramatist.
In play after play for them, Nelson (like A.R. Gurney in the United States) has established himself as that contemporary stage rarity, a civilised, urbane, literate, acidic ironist in an age of urban thuggery. The General from America is in fact Bene- dict Arnold, that nation's most infamous traitor, played here by James Laurenson in a major-star performance. In a time of hypocrisy and double-bluff as the War of Independence dragged into the stalemate of 1779-80, Nelson gives us the paradox of an Arnold who is the only fundamentally honest man in a colony of time-servers and crooks.
Around him are ranged Corin Red- grave's disappointingly low-key George Washington, Stephen Boxer's acidic Kern- ble, and John Woodvine as the less famil- iar Sir Henry Clinton, commander of the British forces in North America and deeply in love with the young major whose unfortunate capture is the undoing of Arnold. Howard Davies's wonderfully sub- tle, large-cast production gives us not just a Pageant of American history at one of the great turning-points of the war, but also a domestic tragedy involving Arnold, his wife and sister caught up in an act of fatal but now all too understandable betrayal. The General from America is far and away the best new play I have seen all year, richly deserving a long London run.
Also on the Swan stage at Stratford (which like the Minerva in Chichester always seems to have more interesting work than the neighbouring main stage) is a virtually uncut production by the Aus- tralian Gale Edwards of Webster's The White Devil. Again we get a very powerful character-acting cast (led this time by Richard McCabe, Ray Fearon, Philip Quast, Jane Gurnett and Caroline Blak- iston), working their way through the thick- et of Webster's plots and sub-plots and only leaving one wishing they had tackled his infinitely more rewarding Duchess of Malfi instead.
For the truth about The White Devil is that it never really engages our pity or ter- ror the way the Duchess does: a series of spectacularly violent scenes (how long before Tarantino gets to do the movie?) do not somehow add up to a plot, though Edwards leads us briskly and coolly through all of them, underlining the con- stant theme of man's infinite corruption and women's equally infinite capacity for suffering.
Mercifully this is not a concept produc- tion: it lays out the play for us on an often semi-bare stage, allowing only McCabe as the wonderfully sweaty, lustful Flamineo the chance to take the audience into his confidence as he goes deeper and deeper into a conspiracy of his own making. As for the others, Princes of the Church and their unlucky consorts, the production achieves strong contrasts nowhere greater than when four grieving women rise from the earth to visit retribution on their murder- ous menfolk, a concept that might almost have been lifted from the Shakespearean Queens to Richard III.
Edwards still doesn't convince us that this is a major tragedy: but she does find us a route-map through to its bloody end, and along the way manages to isolate some contemporary themes of sexual struggle.
Those who believe they know Lerner and Loewe's Paint Your Wagon from the 1969 Lee Marvin/Clint Eastwood movie do not in fact know it at all: that at least is the les- son of the new productions by Ian Talbot at his Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park, the first major London revival of the stage show in almost half a century.
Hollywood drastically rewrote an admit- tedly shaky book, and (as was its wont) totally revamped the score, not necessarily for the better. In the Park, we get Lerner's original morality tale about the search for gold being less important than the uncov- ering of the human heart, together with 20 or so of the most darkly lyrical of all his songs. Though always less successful on stage than the Brigadoon which preceded it or the My Fair Lady which came next in the Lerner-Loewe canon, this is still the score that gave us `Wand'rin' Star' and 'I Talk to Trees' and 'They Call the Wind Maria', and in the open air Tony Selby and Claire Carry lead a cast who seem as delighted by the rediscovery as their audi- ences.
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