One up to the waxworks ARTS
ROY STRONG
Whatever is happening to Madame Tussaud? Tossing aside poke bonnet, shawl and crinoline, she is legging it with the best of them in Baker Street these days. Those of you who, like me, love the yellowed wax, the dusty velvet cos- tumes and faltering figures, the hopelessly in- accurate period reconstructions and delirious historical set-pieces, need have no fear, how- ever. These remain untouched. But Tussaud's belongs to the present as well as the past, and to prove it has mounted a spanking new spectacle.
This is Tussaud's theatre workshop. Outside one meets oneself on a television screen (an experience to be recommended only to those under twenty-five), news is flashed on a tele- printer and the month, day and time are in- scribed above. Inside a cavern of blackness, steps lead up and down and overhead hahgs a tangle of lights, loudspeakers and projectors. Into this womb Tussaud's from now on will insert the heroes and heroines of the hour: 'Heroes-Live' as they have oddly called it. This marvellous shell alone must be the envy of every exhibition organiser in London. Richard Pilbrow and his colleagues think in terms of flexible lighting and sound, and each of the fourteen heroes is presented within his own sequence of effects. The long-term consequences could well be considerable, for museums and art galleries, where sculpture and painting might be presented similarly encompassed by a programme of light. Tussaud's, poised mid- way between museum and fun palace, backed by the funds of commerce, pioneers in a way denied to public institutions.
Within this pitch-black pantheon the heroes reside. Twiggy, like a startled faun, is straddled within an eggshell, her life story hurtled at us across the irresistible din of Serjeant Pepper and the Procul Hamm. Both figure and clothes are exquisitely modelled in white plaster, near- by crouches a photographer yelling instructions and a complex of psychedelic patterns ripples across her body. Ten feet away Nureyev re- volves in a plastic dome, a flower child premier danseur, gyrating alternately to the thud of Coppelia and the moan of 'San Francisco.' The discovery that if you stick a figure on a turn- able it whizzes round seems to have gone to the organisers' heads, however, since Cassius Clay and Nobby Stiles are treated in the same way. The latter, berserk with joy, mouth agape, clutching the Cup, rotates against a collage of flags and rosettes—a dreadful warning never to lake up any sport that requires the participant's false teeth to be left in the dressing room. For- tunately the bull fighter, El Cordobes, has his mouth firmly shut. He is caught, virtually hori- ontal, a figure which could have looked like 4 jet-propelled sandbag, but here tense with Muscular movement and thrust. My favourite hero is Hitchcock, standing in a showerbath tevealed from time to time by the drawing of t( plastic curtain, a shattering shriek and cuts born the sound tracks of his films.
These demonstrate the techniques employed at their best; but certain items could be popped straight into the Tussaud melting pan. At the top of this list comes Frank Sinatra sitting in a plastic champagne glass with soap bubbles puffed over him at intervals. He is virtually.
unrecognisable and, since Tussaud's depends on immediate recognition by the milling masses, he flops on this account quite apart from his vacuous, total tastelessness. The same applies to the Beatles, who arise out of a bed of plastic orchids, festooned with damask frock coats, Indian tunics and beads, their faces contorted with extreme agony as if the glass case in which they sit were an extermination cubicle. Gerald Scarfe sculptures are definitely not for Tussaud's.
Then there is Robert Kennedy, who has be- come a cult icon, with everything short of sconces for votive candles. Silhouetted in front of an oval screen on to which flash pop-art slides of his brother's assassination, like stills from Bonnie and Clyde, the tableau left me nauseated. The public, however, found this con- traption utterly mesmerising and stood silent as the news of the President's death was an- nounced. Whatever one's reactions, Tussaud's is right in the basic assumption, that 'Heroes- Live' should involve the full range of human emotion, and bereavement tends to be under- catered for these days.
There is, too, a lack of wit. Here Tussaud's understandably finds itself teetering on the edge. Should this be a Valhalla where incense eter- nally rises and the ceilings forever echo to the chant of the faithful, or may Tussaud's indulge in pungent visual wit? Occasionally there are flashes. Bless Hitchcock for allowing us to see him in his woollen undies as well as in his natty suit, and Cassius Clay hurtling round pouting in a tinfoil box sandwiched between glitterdust loudspeakers is really funny. But think what one could do with the present political scene alone. Ten feet of General de Gaulle dumped by the exit jabbering 'Non' is not enough.
What most fascinated me was that somehow Tussaud's has emerged with a new form of portraiture, or projection in absence of the characteristics of another human being. Pain- ters and sculptors express in their respective media the physical patina of a person, but why not add a pattern of light and sound, not to produce a crude facsimile, but so that the on- looker is assailed through other senses by im- pressions of another individual and his world? These are permutations of the happening, ex- tensions of the Shakespeare Exhibition tech- niques which entered Tussaud's via the still terrific 'Battle of Trafalgar .. . as it happened.' And for this exhibition there has been renewed experimentation. One reassesses the tradition of high academic realism which suddenly seems absolutely right within this world of pop: Jean Fraser's Muggeridge and Hitchcock and James Butler's El Cordobes are staggering instances
of this at its best, right down to pitted cheeks and running sweat; Arthur Pollen's Bardot (in a birdcage of flowers by Peter Blake) has all the exquisite fragility that one associates with Madame Tussaud's own work at the French Court in the eighteenth century. All of which goes to show that the Duke of Wellington was right when he pronounced Tussaud's the 'most entertaining place in London.' He ought to know, since he has been marooned there for over a century.
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