Theatre
De profundis
Kenneth Hurren
Hanratty in Hell (Open Space) Amy and the Price of Cotton (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs) The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (New End, Hampstead) White Liars and Black Comedy (Shaw)
I doubt whether anyone will be so naive about the orientation of the 'avant-garde' theatre (yes. I think both italics and quotation marks, not to mention the occasional scream) as to be misled by the title of Hanratty in Hell. It is, indeed, about the James Hanratty who was hanged for what is usually referred to as the A6 murder, and he is, indeed, in hell—where, postulating its existence, homicidal rapists may be presumed to end up. The case is one, though, in
which the guilt of the accused has been questioned (partly because another man has made confessions, later withdrawn, and partly because of the dubiety of identification evidence, which was accepted, and of Hanratty's alibi, which was not), and you are as likely to find the Open Space and its director, Charles Marowitz, offering support for the verdict of the court as you would be to find them propagandising on behalf of apartheid, censorship, doing away with subsidies for the arts or bringing back the rope and the cat.
The contention of their author, Andrew Carr, as you would properly expect, is that Hanratty was wrongly convicted, mainly due to the devilish machinations of the police, which were so successful that the prosecution not only was able to persuade an earthly jury of the man's guilt but fooled the Great Judge in the sky as well. The play, if that's the word I'm groping for (which seems unlikely), is a fantasy based on the idea of reopening the case over there on the wrong side of the Styx, so that Hanratty can at least get justice in eternity even if he missed the breaks in our temporal and fallible courts.
Being a relatively casual reader of trial reports, I'm not too well up on the facts of the matter and Carr is not too enlightening. It would not be easy to pin a charge of impartiality on him. His opening scene, focused on the motives of the other suspect, has the ominous sound of a mind slamming shut, and that's the way it stays. Once I had the message that he had decided to ignore any evidence not in accord with his preconceived findings (though only last year it was pronounced to be 'overwhelming' after an inquiry I have no reason to believe prejudiced), I'm afraid I could not take him altogether seriously as a seeker after the truth. Even those who share his own view of the case will be dismayed by the transparency of his tendentiousness, and his reconstruction of events will appeal only to rather specialised audiences who may find some warped diversion in his amusing method of bringing the processes of law into disrepute and loading the dice against his alternative culprit whom he does not hesitate to name.
None of this, I suppose, is precisely within the formal scope of drama reviewing, but it is doubtful whether that is what the promoters are looking for, especially since it might be accomplished in a couple of words that could easily get this journal banned from the mails. It is, on the whole, an unsavoury business, not made the more palatable by Carr's enthusiastic character assassinations: the policemen are given the name of Kray, with personalities to match, and even the hapless young woman who was raped, disabled and saw her lover murdered is portrayed by this extraordinarily insensitive writer as a rather jolly participant in the frame-up, bucked no end when she gets an 'innocent' man hanged. Certainly the case has legitimate public interest, and any instance of a possible miscarriage of justice is a matte' of legitimate public concern, but no valuable purpose is served by prejudices so palpable. The acting, as it happens, is frightful, too.
It is better in Amy and the Price of Cotton, but the rise in altitude from the cellars of Tottenham Court Road to the rarefied heights of the Theatre Upstairs in Sloane Square is not otherwise salutary, and the purposes of the management in staging the work are similarly inscrutable—unless, of course, the George Devine Award, which the play won for Michael McGrath, carries a reckless guarantee of production. The piece is an exploration of the grubbier reaches of sexual behaviour in Victorian times and, as a social document, is not much less urgent than its subject matter implies, though the quality and delicacy of the writing might be compared not unfavourably with that of Conte Into My Bed. The putupon heroine, a singularly unfortunate girl in her choice of men, is played by the alluring Celia Gregory with a valour which, whether or not she read either the script or the small print in her contract, does not quail at gratuitious nudity.
I daresay the predicament of the central figure in The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant is even more distressing and Delphine Seyrig, who has been imported to bring II to a species of life, gives a graphic account of the poor woman's grief when she is deserted by the shallow beauty with whom she has become infatuated but who returns in the end to the heterosexual life. Those for whom lesbianism is apt to leave, as it were, a nasty taste in the mouth, may take an unsympathetic view of Petra's emotional turmoil, though for myself I'm bound to say there is more offence in the boring length at which she goes on about it, in dialogue pitched ill some intimidating territory between banality and absurdity. Rainer Werner Fassbinder has already made a moving-picture of his steamy little assault on the ladies; I seem to recall that the sub-titling incited some jocularity when it was shown here, and he is no luckier in his translator in this version.
One way and another, the week's only joY was the double-bill of Peter Shaffer revivals' or, rather, half of it : White Liars, despite some re-writing, remains an unsatisfactory grapple with the knotty problem of separating the realities of the human personalitY from the deceptive veneers; but the marvellously ingenious Black Comedy is as entertaining as ever.
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