Theatre
Esprit de core?
Mark Amory
Operation Bad Apple (Royal Court) Skirmishes (Hampstead) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Gate at the Latchmere) Murder in Mind (Strand) The prologue of Operation Bad Apple shows Assistant Commissioner Peter VYvyan exhorting the Wiltshire police not to pull their punches as they investigate cor- ruption among their brothers at the Met. In the following scene he receives his monthly cut of £4,000 from a chief inspector and Makes a remark about harassing black Youths so that there will be riots and a de- mand for greater police powers. My spirits sank, not because I believe that such things do not happen — I have no idea — but because it looked as if the play was going to assume guilt and not bother to be convin- Clog. However in a series of short, clear scenes we are then shown the country men struggling with the slippery Londoners and the fact that we know that that guilt goes all the way to the top makes for a gripping story of `Will they get away with it?' It is told with humour and a relaxed knowing- ness about detail. G. F. Newman scores ntanY points for social accuracy, though the 'uglier the fewer. The centre of the play is strong with the boys from Wiltshire com- paratively incompetent ('I thought you were going to bring the handcuffs') and comparatively honest, fiddling their ex- penses and cheating the coffee machine but not above framing — they say fitting — an 1MPortant grass when they need to. Corrup- tion is put at about 95 per cent; but too many men with too much power are too in- volved and there is a cover-up. As after Operation Countryman, the inescapable Parallel, a few charges are brought, fewer convictions obtained. The cover-up is stated rather than shown and the weakness to the observation of the top people lets the big fish off the hook. A few caricatures plot on the golf course and hard-won credibility floats away. Things would not happen quite tike this; which is not to say they would not happen. It becomes possible to shrug off the most important final step of the attack; but While my mind rejects the implicit ac- cusations as (inevitably, this is fiction) not be1ng supported by evidence, the play has planted a sometimes persuasive vision, Which accords with the known facts. , Skirmishes is a brief, domestic piece for three actors one of whom scarcely speaks. This is Mother, who is centre stage on her death bed. Her elder daughter Jean has stayed and nursed her and any restraint or good manners she ever had have been worn away by the strain. Her language is raw and vivid, as when she says that she does not think she wants to have children, it sounds 'too much like extracting giblets'. She in- sults the dying woman on the assumption that she can no longer hear and pours forth a flood of resentment over her sister Rita. Rita is prettier, smiles a lot and talks about her children. She is the sort who feels that unpleasant things are best left unsaid, and if you keep your sitting-room tidy, with luck your life may follow suit. 'I know how to conduct myself', she says complacently. Given that Frances de la Tour is at full throttle as Jean, I was confident where my sympathy lay and would remain; I was wrong. Rita (Gwen Taylor, also excellent) has an attractively tough centre. She refers to her mother as a `bigoted old cow' but, when Jean will not help wash her, she does it alone; whereas Jean really has, we gradually .realise, Gone Too Far. It is a grim, sharply written little tale, convincing you, as Ivy Compton-Burnett does, that, under sufficient pressure, almost anyone is capable of cruelty and wickedness. It will be interesting to see what Catherine Hayes writes next.
Hunter S. Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (one of the great titles) in 1971 and bid a premature farewell to the spirit of the Sixties, rather as Waugh did to country-house life with Brideshead Revisited, though in a different tone. It is interesting to hear him recoiling from Nixon, Mitchell and Agnew without know- ing about Watergate. The story, such as it is, tells of his own drive to Las Vegas with his swarthy attorney and and their adven- tures under a bewildering but impressive variety of drugs, which they sniff, swallow and smoke but mercifully do not inject. Singapore Gray sounds nice. The prose is as lurid and overheated as their Cadillac, the mood dreamlike in that it is intense rather than coherent. Somehow the Polo Lounge, stretches of desert, Las Vegas night clubs and a couple of hotel rooms, among other scenes, are squeezed onto the tiny stage of the new Latchmere Theatre and the energy which fuelled the novel is whipped up. Hav- ing two actors as Thompson, sometimes simultaneously performing an action as it is narrated, works well; Jeffrey Chiswick covered in hair and soapsuds, but at one point in nothing else, has the combination of crudeness and intelligence, as well as the accent, to convince as the Samoan attorney and, all in all, hearing about and watching other people's trips has rarely been so ac- ceptable.
Murder in Mind by Terence Freely has been given a rough reception, but that is because critics have treated it as if it were a play, when it belongs to the subspecies thriller. Of course the dialogue is flat, the atmosphere stagy, the characters of card- board; what is demanded is an ingenious plot and they are at the mercy of it. There is a country house full of people who seem like actors trying, not very hard, to pretend that they are international art dealers. Perhaps they are just that, all possibilities must remain open. The star, Nyree Dawn Porter, acts not with more feeling but with more emphasis and when she says these are not her family, we believe her. The policeman is allowed to be a whole degree more human and so we feel tolerably confi- dent that he is not an imposter. Even some dull psychological gobbledygook has its function. I am not saying it is a master- piece, but out of five such plays in the West End, I put it second only to The Mousetrap, which, as I remember, is really rather good.
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