ARTS & AMUSEMENTS

The Case For Theatre

By MALCOLM RUTHERFORD The Zoo Sum); and George Dandin. (Stratford East.)—The Marriage Brokers. (Mermaid.)

Tins was a very good week. There had been times when it seemed that a theatre critic was becoming rapidly redundant, visions that at an

editorial conference s...meone would finally say what had been in one's mind for months: do we really need a theatre calumn? That of course it

was all right when there t,as a theatre but that really several hundred words week after week on

Sandy Wilson, on Our Man Crichton, on Maggie May were a bit excessive. Not that anyone had anything against such entertainments, but there is not perhaps very much that needs to be said about them, that it was all very well to write about the theatre as it was or should be, but would it ever be again? And how many people did one know who hadn't written oft the theatre except for the most occasional outing? In conversation one's asked what's good expecting the answer nothing (and often it's hard enough not to give it), and back it goes to films. This week, however, the theatre came back in triumph.

I think I dismissed Stage Sixty when the com- pany first took over at Stratford East last autumn as committing ostentatious cultural suicide, and I hope I am never so wrong again. Stage Sixty set out for the highest standards and is within reach of attaining them. This is not just a question of acting and production—both of these have some way to go but-have already improved enormously —but of the whole tone of the place. Of foreign works the company either commission or prepare their own translations, they provide an original and attractive programme and their choice of plays promises to be inspiring.

I can think of few people who would ever have conceived of making a double bill of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story and Moliere's George Dandin. It is one of those brilliant ideas which once thought of seem entirely obvious. The two plays, and indeed the two authors, complement each other perfectly. Both are astringent comedies written by theatrical craftsmen. Both are about a man who cannot make himself understood, who, however much sympathy he may deserve, can make no contact with those around him. The one is killed with his own knife, the other left abandoned on stage crying that there is no other course but to throw himself in the river headfirst. We do, not believe that this is what George Dandin will actually do. Nor is it the actual killing which concerns us in The Zoo Story. What matters is that both men are isolated, and tha: in both plays their condition is revealed with the maximum economy of words and actions. Every word and action there is cries out for the stage.

• Mr. Albee's language is dazzling, his intricate storytelling a delight. Jerry meets Peter sitting on a bench in a park one Sunday afternoon. Jerry has been to the zoo, Peter has `an executive position in a small publishing house. We . . . uh . . . publish text-books.' He is conventional, married with two daughters (no male child, as Jerry maliciously points out), each of whom has a parakeet, and tip comes to the park to read most Sundays. He is comparatively adjusted and there- fore meat for Jerry who has never made it. Elliptically Jerry tells the tale of his loneliness. He sets out to describe what happened that day at the zoo where the animals are caged off from

the people and largely from each other. What he tells rather is the story of Jerry and the dog.

Jerry and the dog are not friends. 'First,' thought Jerry, 'I'll kill the dog with kindness and if that doesn't work . . . I'll just kill him.' The method is to ply him with hamburgers, then one day to add a spread of rat poison. The telling is masterly. Though in the text the speech runs to seven pages, Mr. Albee introduces into this one monologue more characters, more situations, more sense of theatre than one will frequently find in an entire play. Jerry simply plays all the parts, including the dog. It is as effective and economical a device as that of Jane Austen when she would put the description of an entire scene in Emma into the mouth of the garrulous Miss Bates. It is a supreme example of the writer's way of imposing order on what is seemingly chaotic. Here is just one extract:

When I bought the hamburger 1 asked the man not to bother with the roll, all I wanted was the meat. I expected some reaction from

him: like we don't sell no hamburgers without rolls; or, wha' d'ya wanna do, eat it out'a ya

han's? But no; he smiled benignly, wrapped up the hamburger in waxed paper, and said: A bite for ya pussycat? I wanted to say: No, not really: it's part of a plan to poison a dog I know. But, you can't say 'a dog I know' without sounding funny; so I said, a little too loud, I'm afraid, and too formally: YES, A BITE FOR MY PUSSYCAT. People looked up.

Mr. Albee is so intensely conscious of how people talk, of their slightest actions, that he seems always to be inserting stage directions. Thus: 'he smiled benignly' and 'so I said, a little too loud.' He has an eye for the tiniest detail. He expects people to react, he detects meaning in the slightest speech inflections, in a man's particular choice of even the tritest words. Peter, for example, says he comes to the park 'most Sundays,' every Sunday' would be to sound too conventional, even if it were true. And with all this he carries the fullest apprecia- tion of and respect for the form of a play as a whole, an appreciation in fact quite as great as that of Moliere himself.

The Zoo Story apparently was staged once before in London—at the Arts. This time it must not be allowed to vanish so quickly. Jerry is played by Stephen Berkoff, 'excellent on the dia- logue but a little limited on the gestures, Peter by the company's resident and rising star Ewan Hooper.

In George Dandin Mr. Hooper takes over. This is not quite the play Moliere wrote, but it has been most cunningly redevised by David Thompson, who is both translator and director. Dandin is a tradesman married above himself and cursing it. Whether or not his wife is actually cuckolding him is never revealed, but certainly she is running it pretty cloF. Dandin's difficulty is to prove it to•her parents. Three times he tries and always unsuccessfully. In the original, Dandin is regarded with contempt both for his stupidity and his initial wish to raise his station. Here Mr. Thomp- son allows him a measure of sympathy, but not too much. The temptation to turn him into a stock English North Country comic is avoided by giving him a thick and splendid Glasgow accent. The play is brilliantly even musically constructed, with each of the very few superfluous lines in the original removed : just three short scenes played

without an interval. Each scene is an echo of the other, though each time Dandin's humiliation is the greater as he sends for his wife's parents only to find that the final proof of her inconstancy. has evaded him by the time they arrive. There is an attractively art nouveau-ish set and some very lively acting. The pace needs only to be that little bit faster.

At the Mermaid too there is joy, tempered with irritation that the acting is uneven and the pro- duction at times appallingly slipshod. Gogol's Marriage has become The Marriage Brokers, but whether it is a farce or comedy is not always clear and at times the two styles conflict. Of the three suitors brought in as possible husbands for the over-insipid Natasha Techonovna, it is the government official (Robert Eddison) who steals the show and takes the bride. He is aided by a friend, motives unspecified, and rompingly played by John Moffatt. If any of the other actors were as good as these two, then maybe it would seem there had been more competition. Mr. Moffatt gives a magnificent performance straight out of English Restoration comedy. Mr. Eddison when he is alone could be playing a kind of farcical Chekhov, with the tears still never very far away. Locked in a room so that he cannot escape his bride to be, he contemplates first the joys of marriage that he has avoided for so long, then the life he is about to lose. He can escape only through the window and over a difficult garden fence. 'I will sacrifice my trousers for my free- dom,' he declares and it seems a bold decision. His

scene with Natasha is superb: 'which church did you go to last Sunday?' and afterwards Natasha's 'what interesting things he talkeJ about. I should

like to go on talking to him and perhaps say something myself.' Not perhaps for purists, at times I thought it hilarious.