Theatre
Flagging spirits
Kenneth Hurren
The Clandestine Marriage by George Colman and David Garrick (Savoy) A Journey to London by John Vanbrugh and James Saunders (Greenwich) Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare (Aldwich) Paradise by David Lan (Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court) Last week was one of those weeks when I would rather have been somewhere else and engaged in a more fruitful trade. These occasions are relatively few, the exceptions and not the rule; whereas in, say, the eighteenth century, things must have been the other way about. It is not an altogether irrelevant comparison, for two of the pieces up for notice last week derive from the eighteenth century, and neither of them is by Sheridan.
The Clandestine Marriage is said to be, in part, the work of the actor David Garrick whose aim — according to a programme note by its present director, Ian McKellen — "was to get laughs and to make money", though he was not, as a matter of fact, so imprudent as to pursue this aim to the point of actually appearing in the work. Indeed, Garrick adamantly declined to lend himself to the role of Lord Ogleby, thereby expressing a perspicacious judgement that has been doubly defied by Alastair Sim, who now makes his second appearance in the role.
I don't know whether Sim makes any money worth talking about from the play, but I shall not deny his ability to get laughs from the part. He first played Lord Ogleby at Chichester in 1966 and now substantially repeats his quiveringly comic caricature of this antique rake whose title permits him to cherish misguided hopes of Fanny — in this case, the nubile younger daughter of a self-made merchant eager to infiltrate the aristrocracy. It is a part from which his personation of drooling senescence and arthritic lust squeezes the ultimate drop of mirth, but it is a paltry exercise of his talents in a part that, even so, is considerably less than the whole. The proceedings in general — for all the briskness of Ron Moody's calculating merchant ("A matter of twenty or thirty thousand pounds should secure her a tradesman or a Member. of Parliament") and the comeliness of Kay Barlow and Bridget Armstrong as his daughters — are, at best, prettily pedestrian.
A Journey to London is the play that Vanbrugh (who was busy with other things, such as Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace) did not trouble to finish. That industrious adapter Colley Cibber once completed it as The Provoked Husband, and now James Saunders
has tidied up its loose ends with some sprightliness but finally both tastelessly and faintly dishonestly. I doubt whether Vanbrugh had it in mind to be so hard on his male chauvinists or so sympathetic to his put-upon ladies, and the developments are as true to the period as telephones and washing machines. Since the company also lacks the appropriate style, Saunders would clearly have done better to have imbedded his notions in a contemporary play of his own.
I was not greatly enraptured by David Jones's production of Love's Labour's Lost at Stratford-uponAvon, mainly because I spent most of my time cringeing at the prominence given to the play's paralysing assortment of low grotesques, both rustic and academic, to the detriment of the winsome lyricism of its courtly romances. Now that the show is in London, following an extended tour, the balance is somewhat restored and in the context of the week I fell gratefully upon the graces of Ian Richardson and Estelle Kohler in the comedy's more respectable roles.
As for the new play of the week, it might be held that the Theatre Upstairs exists partly to allow embryonic playwrights to make their mistakes. I cannot help thinking, though, that it would have been kinder to David Lan if he had been allowed to make the mistake of Paradise* — half-baked philosophising imposed upon a ludicrous melodrama of the Napoleonic wars — in discreet privacy.
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