Venice well preserved ARTS
HILARY SPURLING
Venice Preserv'd, which opened last week at the Theatre Royal, Bristol, was until this cen- tury performed as regularly as Shakespeare; and its themes are as intriguing, if perhaps less pressing now than they were in 1682. The play deals with revolution, anarchy and political idealism; with a small, self-chosen band—Wen of Souls fit to reform the ills/Of all Mankind' —dedicated to violence in the cause of liberty and freedom. Indeed, in the minds of Pierre and his conspirators, revenge is the other face of liberty; disgust at misgovernment scarcely separable from the itch to see 'these wide streets run blood,' to shoot, kill, burn and 'cut the Throats of reverend Rogues in Robes.'
Admittedly a sound reaction, judging by what little we see of the senators of Venice—the one a vicious bigot, the other a senile sexual pervert (and it would take a bold man to treat a contemporary politician as Otway, in this play, dealt with Shaftesbury). But, stout Tory as he was, Otway is not concerned with the structure of politics or power. What fascinated him was always the transports of passion— rape or seduction pinned squirming in the act —and, in this last, sombre tragedy, the quicken- ing pulse of revolution : the strands of resent- ment, self-glorification and disinterested zeal whereby, for these harassed, frantic intellec- tuals, the means become the end, violence another form of lust. So that their dedication to a vague but 'glorious Cause' sounds ominously meagre beside their grand and fevered images of destruction:
`How lovely the Adriatique Whore Drest in her Flames, will shine! Devouring Flames!'
And, in Val May's production, the scenes with the conspirators are the core of the play : scenes in which a kind of corporate delirium throbs in the lines, in which the various thrusts of spite or personal envy are gathered into great waves of violence and rancour. And yet these furtive, rabid, shabby men, squabbling in a cellar, give off an overwhelming sense of moral squalor. Their actions are pitifully ineffectual, their resolution scarcely less so. If Pierre's determination is unwavering, Jaffeir's hangs by a thread—for all his magnificent self-justifica- tion, he joined the cause on an impulse of private wretchedness, and he betrays it on another
Very few playwrights, and certainly no other English heroic dramatist, have managed to reconcile, as Otway does with such superb assurance, the tragic and the squalid; for Venice Preserv'd shines with that bitter honesty which runs through Otway's comedies and which glimmers so disastrously—creating an effect of monstrous cynicism—in his early tragedies: here, at last, it finds its most power- ful expression in the moral and intellectual shiftiness of his two agonised protagonists. One finds nowhere else this subtle juxtapositioR of the heroic bombast of the period with the bleak, humorous truthfulness characteristic of Restoration comedy. Take, for instance, Pierre's splenetic outbutit—on the perennial conflict between love and duty—to Jaffeir, found attempting to console the fair and hapless Belvidera :
'What feminine Tale hast thou been listening to Of unayed shirts; Catharrs and Tooth Ach got By thin-sol'd shoes? Damnation! that a Fellow Chosen to be a Sharer in the Destruction Of a whole People, should sneak thus in
corners . .
If the play yields, in the end, an impression of serenity and beauty, it is due at least in part to this counterpoint between the images of want—'thin-sol'd shoes,' midst winter frosts, thin clad and fed with sparing.' starve like Beggars brats . . . Under a Hedge and whine ourselves to death'—cold, hunger, pain, and the morose ferocity, the lurid and bloodthirsty dreams of the conspirators.
Also, of course, to the highly and intricately wrought surface of the text which, in this pro- duction, is brilliantly served by Alan Bates, as the abject, irresolute and woeful Jaffeir: whose woe, if not strictly watched, is apt to degenerate into a monotonous and maudlin dirge. But Mr Bates, haggard in green and swaying from the wrists like water weed in a fast current, maintains a most judicious balance between Jaffeir's pliancy and the sterner qualities—of timing, pitch, pace and breath control—which make his grand mono- logues so pleasurably thrilling. And he has, in Ingrid Hafner, a Belvidera with the melting tenderness and the 'soft, bewitching face' of Elizabeth Barry, whom Otway loved, who treated him with pitiless indifference, and for whom he wrote this sad and much wronged lady. Miss Hafner in distress, and later run- ning mad, is a delight to watch.
Antony Webb, on the other hand, makes Pierre a trifle thick : no trace here of that passionate idealism, or of that self-knowledge —for Pierre is the only one of the conspirators who betrays an inkling of the seamier sources of their exultation—which he shares with Otway's comic heroes, and which makes him one of the most complex tragic heroes ever penned. Mr Webb's bluff and manly Robin Hood seems to have strode in by mistake from another, and rather simpler, scenario. Or per- haps he came with the set, a precarious arrangement by Robin Archer of steps, pillars, platforms, chapels, dungeons, all constructed on the dinkiest scale and crowned with a pink- flushed picture postcard of the Doge's palace. To settle for this quaintly dated naturalism— instead of the fairly formal setting for which the play was written and for which, after all, the Theatre Royal was built—seems odd; and prompts uneasy speculations as to why, for in- stance, Belvidera should happen to be so con- veniently passing on the Rialto in her nightdress; or whether, in his lascivious frenzy, Antonio will not tumble altogether off his ledge into the vaults beneath.
But all is forgiven for the sake of this 'Antonio, in whom Bernard Hepton has found
a primness which sits most jauntily, skew-whiff so to speak, on Otway's cruelly contemptuous grotesque: extraordinary to find this dapper little oddity capering so briskly in scenes of such rank, obscene brutality. Mr Hepton is a treasure, and well served by Patricia Maynard's admirably raucous whore. And what emerges sharply from the whole production is the extra- ordinary richness of this grim and lovely play; to Mr May we owe our thanks for giving us Otway's one perfect tragedy to set beside Peter Gill's production of that great harsh comedy, The Soldier's Fortune, at the Royal Court two years ago.
The same theatre, last week. saw the opening of, a season of plays by Edward Bond which I shall review together later. Meanwhile Your OM? Thing, which reached the Comedy with its cast intact from Broadway, is a very pretty little thing indeed, though perhaps a shade—thirty minutes by my reckoning—too long for its small width. The set (by Robert Guerra with dot- and-flower patterns projected by the Des Pro Studios Inc.) is among the smartest to be seen anywhere in London, the music not remarkable but the cast incomparably welt drilled. Marcia Rodd's Olivia, in particular. has very many charms. The text is based on what remains of Twelfth Night with the sub-plot gutted, and Shakespeare's speeches—ransacked on the prin- ciple. much favoured by contemporary com- posers, of pillaging from the past—come up a treat in this brisk, laconic, transatlantic context. And Frank Marcus's one-act play, The Window (at the Ambiance Lunch Hour Theatre Club in Queensway), is enchanting: short, tart, accomplished, and admirably acted by Richard Pascoe and David Cook.
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