Theatre
Ross (Old Vic)
Highly charged posturing
Christopher Edwards
Donald Freed's latest play from America stars Faye Dunaway as a First Lady possessed of surprising qualities — a left-wing intellectual, ex-Southern beauty Queen and former sex goddess to the High School football team. She is terrified of what 'walking tall' is doing to America and contemptuous of the posturing, ramrod male sexuality that she believes lies behind it. As a sex goddess and welcome partici- pant in teenage gang bangs she can claim to be something of an authority on this last subject but her political rhetoric is not always so convincing. When the play opens we find her under the guard of the other character, Bravo (Stephen Jenn), a crop- ped, robotic secret agent in mirrored sun- glasses who she reduces, in the final scene, to a state of vulnerable childlike depend- ence.
It is an apocalyptic play which, under Harold Pinter's direction, projects a highly charged atmosphere of crisis. The First Lady, code name Circe, has been removed from the White House because of her tendency to talk to the press — despite the classical allusion the only shade she in- yokes is that of Martha Mitchell of Water- gate fame. It seems that the President, in her absence, is about to start a nuclear war. But although the writing is passionate the playwright's convictions about corruption, venality and fear in high places are express- ed in the crudest of political terms, top heavy with the first Lady's unlikely book learning and full of tendentious historical interpretation.
Surprisingly, this overwritten quality is well matched by a powerful display of overacting from Faye Dunaway. Emo- tionally she is straight out of the ornate, overloaded southern belt usually associ- ated with Tennessee Williams's heroines. It is not a subtle performance but it is fierce, always watchable and at times quite hypnotic.
T. E. Lawrence described his capture by the Turks in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In Deraa he was tortured and sexually abused because he would not go to bed with the governor of the city: `. . . In my despair I spoke. His face changed and he stood still, then controlled his voice with an effort, to say significantly, "You must understand that I know; and it will be easier if you do as I wish." I was dumbfounded, and we stared silently at one another.' What precisely did his captor know? It was impossible that he knew that he had before him his enemy Lawrence of Arabia. Did he simply intuit that his prisoner was a masochist and a homosexual? Or perhaps this was just a line he always gave to blond Circassians to try to persuade them to let him have them. Whatever was meant Lawrence said no and a corporal was instructed `to take me out and teach me everything'.
That last 'everything' has also been the subject of some debate although Terence Rattigan, in this 1960 episodic play, made it as clear as he could at the time that Lawrence was sodomised. In fact it is the key incident in the piece and represents the moment when Lawrence's will is broken by the revelation to himself of his own homosexuality. He leaves the Middle East soon after to seek refuge under the assumed identity of Ross — an unknown airman.
For the playwright to propose this event as the key to a historical personality confirms what we find in his plays; the only `history' Rattigan wrote was personal history, usually his own. His most sympathetically drawn characters are lonely, at odds with society and often humiliated by desires that their reason cannot control. To them all he extends the sympathy he himself needed to cope with his own, unwelcome, homosexuality. One senses that this portrait of Lawrence was near to his own heart.
But as drama it makes hard watching, even for those who admire the craftsmanship of the 'well-made play' , despite its manipulative pathos and contrived exposition. The dialogue is usually flat where it is not sententious. The encounters between Allenby and Lawrence, while bringing out the former's wit and intelligence, too often just set up Lawrence for yet another facile demonstration of off-the-cuff Boy's Own heroics; for instance the flippant, casual posturing which leads Lawrence to drawl down a field telephone that he has taken Aqaba. Of course we are meant to see the infuriating schoolboy in Lawrence and Simon Ward manages very well both the show-off manner and the adolescent agonies. At times, especially during the scenes at the RAF station, his awkwardness and suffering are genuinely moving. But the enigma of the character lay as much in Lawrence's extraordinary power to lead the Arabs and we see nothing of this quality in Simon Ward's performance. That is hardly surprising, however, as Rattigan himself was not minded to address himself to that interesting and triumphantly manly side of Lawrence's personality.
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