REVIEW OF THE ARTS

Kenneth Hurren on what happened to revue

Déjà Revue, devised by Olav Wyper, compiled by Alan Melville (New London Theatre) Objections to Sex and Violence, by Caryl Churchill (Royal Court) The popular myth, at least among those who reject the suicide theory, is that the species of entertainment known as 'intimate revue' was done to cruel death with the production of Beyond the Fringe in the early 'sixties, and buried in a box called television which shortly therafter put on a series of late-night shows known as a 'satire boom.' Ostensibly this is true enough, yet it seems to me that those events might just as easily have been stimulating rather than lethal to the genre. It was, after all, a kind of show that must always have been as much subject to change as any other; perhaps more so, for more directly than most it drew its inspiration essentially from the mood and fashion, the moral and social climate of its time. Beyond the Fringe itself was directly in this tradition, designed to develop rather than damage the art of revue, to elaborate and extend its terms of reference. One of its writer-performers, Peter Cook, had already been active in the field and had been primarily responsible for the revues called Pieces of Eight and One Over the Eight in 1959 and 1961 respectively; and another, Jonathan Miller, had made his first appearance in London even earlier, in 1954, as one of the gifted amateurs of the Cambridge Footlights.

It may be that if the four young men of Beyond the Fringe had themselves continued to work in

revue, the subsequent story would have been altogether different. As we know, though, Miller was diverted into what he probably feels are higher forms of endeavour in medicine and the classical theatre, Alan Bennett took successfully to writing full-length plays, and although Cook and Dudley Moore are still in the revue business, most of their work has been for television, which is what the audiences who would once have gone to see revues in the theatre are probably now watching — and sighing for the good old days of the 'fifties and 'forties and even, in the case of the real veterans who can affectionately recall the Gate and Herbert Farjeon, the 'thirties.

We should, I'm sure, have been able to find the brilliant essence of their nostalgia crystallised in Déjà Revue. The trouble with nearly all the revues I can remember is that they were never, even the best of them, uniformly good, but even the worst of them had an item or two worth preserving; and Alan Melville's present skimming of the cream might well have been unremittingly devastating. Mysteriously, it isn't.

Some of the bygone triumphs of revue are, of course, irrecapturable, for their success was vested in their topicality. Melville generally, and wisely, avoids such items, except for a handful of numbers from the early 'forties. (e.g. 'We're Going to Get Lit Up When the Lights Go Up in London') which seem as though they could easily have undermined the war effort and are presented here, justifiably, less than reverently as an excerpt from an RAF camp concert. A few other inspirations that may seem to have belonged essentially to their own time — one, for instance, based on the plethora of lingerie advertisements at the sides of Underground escalators (1956) and a political lament, 'There's a Hole in My Budget' (1953) — are still alarmingly pertinent, but in the main Melville has had to rely on material that is less immediate and thus, perhaps, less waspish, and I'm bound to say that his fancies rarely coincide with my own more genial memories.

There will necessarily have been omissions on the grounds that their impact depended on the personality of some unique performer, which may be why the revues that featured the wicked high priestess of the art, Hermione Gingold, are so thinly represented; but I should like to have seen Sheila Hancock — as witty and resourceful a comedienne as could possibly have been recruited — have a shot at more of them. She might have collaborated, too, rather nicely with her present colleague George Cole in that hilarious sketch from For Amusement Only (1956) in which the confusions of the ambitious repertory of a Shakespearian company put the leading players at odds as to the subject of the evening's operations with the result that Romeo pleaded his case to a lady on a balcony dressed as Lady Macbeth who insisted imperiously that she had given suck. This, I should have thought would have figured on anyone's list of the best things of revue.

It is not, however, on Melville's, though he has found room for half a dozen items of his own, which would not have been on mine; and I am surprised, since he took a touching little song called 'Mr Henderson' from High Spirits (1953), that he did not notice and take the opportunity to observe that it was this show, rather than Beyond the Fringe almost ten years later, that did the real pioneering work in raising the satirical sights of revue from the parochial world of the theatrical gossips to aim at the worthier targets of literary culture and international politics.

To round off my catalogue of complaints I doubt whether it was altogether wise to include such numbers as 'These Foolish Things' and 'A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,' celebrated though they are. Most of the revues of long ago seem to have included a sentimental song of this sort, but they can never have seemed especially appropriate to the genre and their appearance in this anthology, after a context of skittish fun has been established, is slightly unnerving; most of the audience at the performance I attended seemed to think their inclusion less than serious and to be waiting for the deflating punchlines which disconcertingly never came. If I felt Déjà Revue likely to survive for long I should counsel their replacement, conceivably by one of the theatrical parodies which were also invariably a feature of these shows — if Melville can think of one that still retains its apposite bite.

Anyone writing such a parody today would, I suspect, fall upon Miss Churchill's Objections to Sex and Violence with larkish glee. It is all so painfully well-meant, full of earnest prattle about the terrible state of society, and how terrible it is to be young in it, especially if one is a girl and men are so beastly, and what ghastly hypocrites are the middle-aged in their jealous puritanism, and perhaps the urban terrorists have something going for them after all. It all takes place on a sandy beach and revolves around a girl called Jule who preaches violence as the only way to get through to Them. Others argue with her, but not to much avail. Even stuffing her mouth with sand, as happens at one point, only briefly stems her garrulous flow of specious philosophising. Rosemary McHale (who plays her), Anna Calder-Marshall, Sylvia Coleridge, Stephen Moore and Ivor Roberts are in a cast who all do remarkably well (not least by keeping straight faces), but the play, for all its talk, is intellectually vacuous and a dreadful trial.

Cinema

Law and disorder

Kenneth Robinson

Little Malcolm Director: Stuart Cooper. Stars: John Hurt, Rosalind Ayres. "X" Bloomsbury. (115 minutes).

Freebee and the Bean Director: Richard Rush. Stars: James Cain, Alan Arkin. "X" Warner West End. (112 minutes).

I didn't expect to be so amused by Freebie and the Bean or so bored by Little Malcolm. Both films deal with violence, and while the first is nearly all action the second is nearly all talk. Little Malcolm is, in fact, adapted from David Halliwell's play. This is one of those worthy affairs that might well be presented after the evening service at a progressive church. The vicar would direct our attention to its message without attempting to explain it. We would look in vain for an Awful Warning and then, after wondering if it was quite nice to applaud something so brimming with spirit-fodder, we would wander away, feeling somehow better because we had endured its ambiguous sermonising.

This is the sort of film which, we are expected to tell ourselves, says a good deal more than it appears to say. In fact, it says a good deal less. At the first appearance of Malcolm — an expelled art-student — and the three followers of his vague revolutionary plans, I found the characters quite entertaining. They seemed like a cross between the 'Goodies' and the schoolboys in Richmal Crompton's 'William' stories. But as they staged their pathetic little marches and meetings, contemplating the value of power for its own sake, the film dwindled into Significance. I liked John Hurt's performance as the Hitlerian leader whose ranting leads other people into an act of irrelevant violence, but I was sorry for him because the part had so little meaning.

The trouble with any symbolic stories about power and violence is that they say only what has been said many times before. There will always be new generations of golden-hearted lasses and lads ready to point all the obvious morals. And there certainly should be. But I think I'm getting old enough to be excused, and to go instead so such comedies of violence as Freebie and the Bean.

This is yet another of those crazy cops-and-crooks stories where a fantastic amount of damage is done to people and property, especially in the mad car smashes. I kept making notes, reminding myself that the whole thing was very sick, but I came away not agreeing with

Spectator January 11, 1975

a word I had written. I had, of course, enjoyed the car chases which took the two cops, Freebie and Bean, down wrong-way streets, across open-air markets and art galleries and even — via an overhead ramp — through a third-floor bedroom wall. It is this scene that takes the film away from almost-credible comedy into farce. There is a marvellously funny moment here when one of the cops gets out of his car and an old couple wave casually to him from their bed as he asks if he can use their telephone.

After this even the nastiest incidents are unbelievable, including the shooting of a transvestite while he is practising kung fu in a ladies' lavatory; the collapse of a comical old crook with a heart attack, and the apparent murder of one of the two cops. I say apparent because, with no explanation, the director, Richard Rush, brings the man to life on the way to the mortuary. The film ends with both cops falling out of the ambulance and starting a. street fight, as the camera retreats above the city skyline. Just before this it has glanced slyly at the American flag, flying above all the disasters. This confused me. I felt I was expected to think something profound, like `Tut-tut.'

The trouble with films of this kind is that you don't know if you are supposed to be laughing at a send-up of the way films of violence are made; or simply laughing at the violence itself. But I did laugh, and I was glad there was so much warm humanity talking its way through the destruction of twenty-three cars, four motor cycles and an apartment house. There was enough good humour to prevent the film being merely another example of mechanisation taking command.

I'm sure that the two principal actors, James Cain and Alan Arkin, have many merry exchanges of dialogue. But a lot of it is deliberately muffled, or even drowned, by music and engine-revving. This is a tiresome new cliche of the cinema. It was especially tiresome to find Richard Rush giving us good dialogue we could hardly hear, while in Malcolm director Stuart Cooper was giving us dialogue we could hear, I'm afraid, only too well.

Records

Heard but not seen

Rodney Mines

We all make mistakes, and maybe my over-violent reaction to the first production of Britten's Death in Venice had a lot to do with the distinctly emetic staging. The fine recording (Decca SET 581-3, £8.85) offers a welcome opportunity to try to come to terms with a work that still has many of my colleagues squirming with ecstasy. At least the recording spares you the embarrassment of the miscast Tadzio and the precious posturing of the choreography, and encourages concentration on Britten's extraordinary technical dexterity, on the sheer brilliance of his musical organisation, to which proper tribute is paid in the record booklet in essays by Donald Mitchell and Peter Evans.

The main problem remains the prolixity of the libretto, not just of whole scenes that seem dramatically superfluous, but of phrases or chunks of description and narration that are unnecessary in a theatre context. Music describes many things better than words, while a gesture, a movement can do the work of ten lines of text — and do it better into the bargain. (I know one shouldn't drag Visconti's film in, but the look on Dirk Bogarde's face, after the foiled departure, said far more about Aschenbach than the six-odd sentences of the opera libretto, and opera is a visual art.) But shorn of the visual element, this duplication of effort is less worrying and, obvious cuts apart (the Games of Apollo remain intolerable even on record), it seems as though Britten might have composed either a very interesting radio opera or an altogether more successful television work than Owen Win grave; indeed, discreet TV direction could save the piece from itself. The cast for the recording is virtually that of the 1973 premiere, and I cannot imagine its being improved upon. It is good to have Peter Pears's Aschenbach preserved in this way, and John Shirley-Quirk's gallery of heavies loses little when detached from his stage performance. The singers and the English Chamber Orchestra under Steuart Bedford are carefully and sumptuously recorded, with many suggestive variations of acoustic to point breaks between interior monologue and exterior action. This set can safely be recommended to those who have succumbed to the work, and even those who have reservations could learn a thing or two.

Nevertheless, I find far more dramatic power and a moral pungent enough to satisfy Miss Liddell herself in the mere forty-five minutes of Roberto Gerhard's The Plague (Decca, HEAD 6, £2.55). This is a melodrama, with chorus, on a text cannily extracted from Camus's novel by the composer himself. The form, of course, is not fashionable, but if any proof Were needed that it is alive and kicking, here it is. There is no more economic way of putting across ideas, and those composers who despise the spoken word should be incarcerated for a month with this score. They, too could learn a thing or two. The narration, beautifully enunciated by Alec McCowen in a quasi-matter-of-fact fashion, combined with the horror of the content, alone sets up powerful resonances, and when the chorus and orchestra join in, the impact is overwhelming — nowhere more so than in the central set-piece describing the slow death of a young boy.

The music is not in the main illustrative, so that when it briefly is — with the squeaking of dying rats or swaying of corpse — and flower-laden tramcars — the impact is the greater. While the score is not in the least 'difficult' to assimilate, neither does it lack substance; these qualities are often held to be mutually exclusive nowadays. Gerhard's command of the orchestra may have been equalled this century, but I do not believe that it has been surpassed. The recording, by the Washington National Symphony and Orchestra and Chorus under Antal Dorati, is superb. If you buy no other record this year, if you avoid contemporary music like the plague itself, I urge you to sample this bewildering and unique masterpiece.

Briefly, two important re-issues: The new pressings of the Toscanini Otello (RCA AT 303/3, £3.58) are brilliantly engineered, and the performance has still not been bettered on record. The give-away price is an added incentive, as if any were needed. And from Decca comes Boieldieu's La Dame Blanche (GOSR 649-51, £5.16), an attractive and influential opera-comique set in a delightfully Gallic WalterScott-land. The vocal performances are wholly authentic, with Michel Sen6chal outstanding as the pseudonymous hero, Georges Brown, and the spoken dialogue is delivered with enormous panache by actors from the Comedie Francaise. The music, merely bland in its charm at first, keeps on coming back at you like those delayedaction cold cures. There is a great deal more to it than meets the ear.