As You Like It (Old Vic)
THEATRE
Dan Dare's Arden
HILARY SPURLING
The Cherry Orchard (Queen's) Let's All Go Down the Strand (Phoenix) Clifford Williams's As You Like It has much in common with the Duke of York's garden. Here, too, many a dangling apricock, fair flower and wholesome herb is choked by weeds, or rather by the noisome designs of Ralph Koltai. Mr Koltai has set the play among fussy clusters of tubes and, for his costumes, has taken the boyish theme—for this production uses men only—all too literally. One can only suppose that as a youth he was smitten with an equal passion for schoolboy Ruritania (short cloaks, short breeks and tight boots) and for Dan Dare and his quaint spacemen from Eagle—who, as I remember, wore spangled polythene bags. The second influence is so strong that one constantly expects a Mekon with dropsical head and tiny warped green body to float out from behind one of Mr Koltai's lurid globular clouds; and it is particularly unfortunate in his PVC ladies' garments. Rosalind, for instance, arrives for her wedding hung with plastic petals in the kind of hygienic, high-necked, surgical gown which Dan Dare's lady wife would have worn, sup- posing he had taken a bride: even down to the elbow-length white gloves, for Eagle was nothing if not genteel.
The whole, in short, suggests that strain of bourgeois vulgarity, at once cheap and over- dressed, which we have learnt to associate with visiting productions from Eastern Europe. And here, however much Mr Williams may disclaim his influence in a programme note, one cannot help discerning the hand of the Pole, Professor Jan Kott. Not that Professor Kott goes in for this ponderous socialist-fantasist whimsy. But it was his book, Shakespeare Our Contempor- ary, which planted the seed of this production at the Old Vic; and, if the book has a fault, it is that the Professor has no sense of humour and is sometimes sadly misled by Shakespeare's.
Remarks like the description of•Ariel, which he quotes with approval, as 'archetypal spy; the embodiment--if and when made flesh—of the Perfect and unspeakable secret police' have fostered the current neo-Ruritanian Kott cult to
which Mr Koltai has fallen a victim. And even Mr Williams is not above indulging the odd spurious thrill: witness his attempts to turn Duke Ferdinand's admittedly treacherous and spy- ridden court into a sinister Kremlin antecham- ber, with thugs busy practising third degree on Oliver de Boys. The same insensitivity lurks throughout the production—to spoil, for in- stance, Marc Wilkinson's exquisite counter- tenor song which Hymen sings for the sophisticates in Arden; Hymen here wears a grotesquely ill-fitting, .imitation-Lurex suit which suggests nothing so much as a commis- sionaire's uniform from some flashy Soviet Wedding Palace.
And which, unhappily, is a pretty fair sample of the level to which the influence of Eastern Europe has been reduced in this production. Mr Williams's men dressed as girls, far from adding new and subtle tensions, have consider- ably simplified the text. What emerges is a sense of the sobriety and intellectual strength of Shakespeare's discussion of love in the play. No trace of bawdy here, much less of that am- biguous erotic excitement kindled between de- sire and frustration, which Professor Kott discusses and which Mr Williams made the basis of his ravishing Renaissance Twelfth Night for the Royal Shakespeare Company last year. On the contrary, Ronald Pickup—in cos- tumes which cruelly emphasise cropped hair, large feet and a baritone voice—plays Rosalind with a studious, sweet simplicity that ignores whole areas of the character: not simply her tart, self-punishing irony, but also the sensuous passion to which it is the curb.
Charles Kay's Celia, on the other hand, is perhaps the richest, most complex and deli- cately humorous study of this lady—whom Shakespeare treated somewhat shabbily—that one may hope to see. The same goes for Derek Jacobi's Touchstone, an archetypal, disconso- late Londoner sadly unimpressed by the waste- lands beyond the metropolis, and for Jeremy trett's engaging and powerfully imagined Orlando. Even with a second troupe away in Canada, this company still has brilliant youth running out at its ears—Frank Wylie's usurp- ing, suave and treacly Duke, Neil Fitzpatrick's shifty Oliver, Richard Kay, a strapping flirt as Phoebe, and Anthony Hopkins's impassive, monumental and eternally feminine Audrey. Robert Stephens's Jaques casts a small shadow here—an excellent notion spoilt by the cramped monotonous note which seems to have crept recently into Mr Stephens's playing. But the production as a whole, wherever it steers clear of its monstrous wraps, has an uncommon deli- cacy; and Mr Wilkinson's music, especially his pop 'Under the Greenwood Tree,' should sweep the charts on a record or I'm a Dutchman.
Which brings us to Prospect Productions' amazing Cherry Orchard at the Queen's. Pros- pect is a touring company based on Cambridge and comes to us now via Edinburgh, which perhaps explains a certain grudging—and wholly misplaced — reluctance skulking amid the general admiration for this production. This Cherry Orchard is not simply of West End stan- dard, it is one of the two or three best things to be seen anywhere in the West End, and has, in the authority, the emotional range and humour of Lila Kedrova's Madame Ranev- skaya, a masterpiece of any time or place. Richard Cottrell's firm and subtle production scrupulously brings out what is often smothered beneath a generalised nostalgia, the analytical clarity, the harshness and glancing delicacy, the fine, supple and infinitely complex fragmenta- tion of moods, which make this that very rare thing, a great play of the twentieth century. 4N Lastly, Hugh and Margaret Williams's Let's Ail Go Down the Strand is a wistful, tenuous funeral rite for a dying race, set in a mausoleum of purple drapes by Anthony Holland and worth dropping in on, perhaps, for the last act, to see Gladys Cooper—in one of those malici- ous set-tos for ill-tempered elderly ladies which are a standby of the genre—deftly slicing a passage through everyone else on stage.
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