Theatre
Cloaked Collusion
By BAMBER GASCOIGNE
Magnyfycence. (Tower Theatre, Canonbury.)—I Must Be Talking to My Friends. (Aldwych.) PLorrtiNG, in the non-theatrical sense of the word, is one of the greatest delights of Eliza- bethan and Jacobean drama. Richard III, the subtlest and most self-satisfied of them all, must stand as the captain of the evil-schemers; but his skilled lieutenants appear throughout Shakespeare, and in almost all the other leading dramatists, con- triving fantastic horrors in The Duchess of Ma/fl, plotting macabre and ruthless self- advancement in The Changeling and The White Devil, and stage-managing obscene revenges in the pages of Tourneur, Chapman and Ford. On a comic level the same skills provide the back- bone of Ben Jonson's best plays.
It is a critical commonplace that these lusty Machiavels descend from the 'vices' of the morality plays—allegorical persons with names like Sedition, Dissimulation, Insolence or Subtle Shift, who lure the hero away from the cooler charms of Honesty, Humility and Good Deeds. This week, however, the dry scholastic link is delightfully revealed in flesh and blood at the Tower Theatre, Canonbury.
The play is John Skelton's Magnyfycence, written in the first quarter of the sixteenth cen- tury and apparently unperformed since 1600. At the start one sees the hero, Magnyfycence, safe- guarding his wealth with the sober help of Measure, but soon such seedy types as Counter- feit Countenance, Crafty Conveyance and Cloaked Collusion have wormed their way into his court. Foly frolics not far behinds, and soon, therefore, Poverty arrives on the scene. Magnyfy- cence is reduced to rags, is gloated over by the parasites who have ruined him and is on the verge of being led by Despair to commit suicide. Just in time Good Hope turns up in white to rescue him and, while Redresse promises that all may yet be well, Sober Circumspection muses on the fickleness of Fortune which 'suddenly can both smile and frown, set up and suddenly set down.'
The shape is conventional enough, though unusually materialistic (the allegory is entirely secular, and loss of wealth is the whole tragedy), but the interesting point when watching the play is that it becomes impossible to see the vices as allegorical figures. In a simpler morality one can continually interpret the actions of, say, Pride or Envy; but here, even apart from the confusing alliteration, Counterfeit Countenance, Crafty Conveyance and Cloaked Collusion are all far too similar to fill separate allegorical roles. On stage, reducing six Cs to two, they seem merely a group of Court Conspirators. Their excitement is, on a much lower level, similar to that of Richard and Buckingham.
Skelton was tutor to the young Henry VIII and later became a bitter enemy of Cardinal Wolsey, so in its own time the play undoubtedly had a topical relevance, warning Henry against Wolsey's ever-increasing influence. Any of the three main vices could stand for Wolsey, but the director of this production, Michael !Ellison, chooses Cloaked Collusion for the cardinal's robe and compares the character, in a pro- gramme note, with the modern 'old boy nee—a valid enough choice, since Wolsey procured for his own son, before he was eighteen, a deanery, four archdeaconries, five prebends and a chan- cellorship.
But it is not the polemical aspect which makes the play appealing today. It is the refusal of Cloaked Collusion and his friends to behave with thin-blooded allegorical decorum; it is the energetic fooling of Foly, an obvious ancestor of Shakespeare's clowns and equally unashamed of intruding on serious matters; and the flitting about of Fansy, who operates very much like a flatter-footed Puck or Ariel. It was a dire mistake to let the actor play this part in fal- setto, but, in general, both the production and the acting is good. All in all, the piece is .a fascinating theatrical foetus, and it's on view till the end of this week.
In I Must be Talking to My Friends, Micheal Mac Liammoir offers a very personal guided tour of Ireland's history and literature. I found it less satisfactory than its sister programme., The Importance of Being Oscar, with which it alternates—partly because the subject is so vast, whereas a couple of hours really could givc" some picture of Oscar Wilde, partly because some of the individual pieces are dull and one
or two, such as the words put into the mouth of the dying Swift, outrageously brash. ManY
of the linking passages have the familiar Mac
Liammoir wit (a nineteenth-century ballad civil: ing that Saint Patrick 'came from dacent people
provokes the comment, 'Well, maybe he did. Cer' tainly he was no Irishman), but there is also 3 new and unappealing 'flip' quality; the Battle of Hastings is referred to as 'that shindy at Hastings—you know, the one with the date.'
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