THEATRE
Arrabaloney
KENNETH HURREN
Even in an age uniquely tolerant of the cultural charlatan, most of the calamities you'll find in reputable playhouses can be said to have the meek but more or less respectable virtue of being well - meaning.
Occasionally, though, one will come along that bears every ear- mark of having been deliberately designed to discover how far a production can go in belabouring its audience with pseudo-intel- lectual twaddle without actually provoking some kind of violent retaliation, and I'm sorry to say that this struck me as precisely the purpose of the National Theatre in taking Fernando Arrabal's The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria into repertory at the Old Vic last week.
It would be charitable to assume that the management was betrayed into a commit- ment to the work on the strength of its suc- cess in Paris (where the state of the theatre is evidently even more alarming than it is here) and before a translation had revealed the full measure of its sheer, staggering dull- ness and juvenility. This is a mere error of judgment that anyone might make. The wil- ful affront is in the subsequent decision to brazen the thing out, with a programme book defensively quoting admiring French critics, together with a casebook biographical note that explains the roots of Arrabal's obsessions but scarcely excuses their loqua- cious display to a lay audience: The exhibit, I should explain before going further, takes the form of a series of charades employing two actors. Trapped in their jockstraps on some desolate, otherwise uninhabited island, they disport themselves as a kind of Prospero and Caliban, and in the roles of sophisticate and savage, master and slave, mother and child, male and female, executioner and victim, and God knows what other pairings, until one of them eats the other, the whole intended as some warped variant of the Universal Allegory that you may have thought dramatists every- where had accepted as something to be put quietly away at puberty.
I am not among those who believe Arrabal himself to be consciously practising some Impudent 'con'; there is nothing in his plays to suggest he has the wit for that sort of game. He. would seem to be, more than any- thing else, a victim of the wayward standards of continental, and especially French, drama criticism, a field in which literary dexterity exceeds acuteness of judgment to a quite spectacular degree. Self-delusion doesn't need much in the way of encouragement, and 1 can't blame this simple, rhixed-up man if he has been persuaded to believe that his untidy nihilist ramblings, blasphemous and misanthropic_in roughly equal parts, offer some valuable and even entertaining corn- Tent on the human condition. The preten- tiousness of our own National Theatre, though, is another matter. Committed to what might have been, at worst, a glum and depressing fiasco, they then, by the em- ployment of one Victor Garcia, ensured its
becoming in performance a really aggressive nuisance.
It's no use their pretending to have been caught unawares by Garcia. The photograph he supplied of himself for the programme (posed in some kind of sleeping bag) would have aroused anyone's suspicions, and his billing material even more so: Garcia doesn't merely 'direct' a play, he is responsible for a 'visual and aural conception'. Only last year, engaged to mount a production in Sao Paulo, Brazil, he is said to have stripped out the interior of the theatre and replaced it with circular shelving to accommodate the spectators. The Old Vic escapes that fate, if little else. Garcia's 'visual conception' in- cludes a battery of lighting that would prob- ably seem excessive at an anti-aircraft station, and from time to time his 'aural conception' features a cacophonous din that sounds as if the building is being dynamited, denying the wretched souls huddled in the auditorium even the consolations of sleep. Worst of all, he has brainwashed a couple of National Theatre actors, the estimable Anthony Hopkins and Jim Dale, men noted hitherto for the sensitivity and intelligence of their work, into prowling and prancing and posturing barmily all over the place, the while conscientiously reciting the preposter- ous text which is clearly as empty of rational meaning for them as it is for the audience.
Backstage intelligence reaching me alleges that these hapless actors occasionally omit great chunks of the rubbish (the difference in running time between one performance and another is anything up to half an hour). I hope no one takes them to task for it. They should, on the contrary, be warmly thanked for anything they may do to lessen the dura- tion of the suffering, and in any event they are to be complimented on any professional skills they devote to these assignments, when they would be entirely justified in getting out there on the stage under the lights and just howling like dogs.
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