14 MARCH 1970, Page 23

THEATRE

Manity's back

HILARY SPURLING

The Apple Cart (Mermaid) Three Months Gone (Duchess) Heads etc (Ambiance Lunch-hour Theatre Club at the Green Banana, Frith Street) The Samuel Beckett Theatre Appeal met last Sunday for a celebrity gala in the Oxford Playhouse with Francis Warner 'very much in the driving seat', according to Huw Wheldon, who had himself, in Mr Warner's moving words, 'piloted our ship—through the quicksands of rehearsal—to the safe har- bour of this moment.' The highlight of this interesting voyage, with Mr Warner at the wheel and Mr Wheldon steering, was the English premiere of Beckett's Breath, currently on view in New York as part of Kenneth Tynan's Oh, Calcutta! Well-placed sources say that the play was written on a postcard: the curtain rises to disclose a heap of scrap, whereupon a baby cries, one breath is drawn and another is exhaled as the lights go up and down, the baby cries again and the curtain slowly falls. No doubt the play worked well enough as a joke on Mr Tynan, though I suspect that it may also have to do with Myles na gCopaleen's old friend, poor suffering Hugh Manity. At any rate, Mr Tynan—feeling as well he might that there is not much in this to meet the eye—put in some naked bodies, which Mr Warner has removed (though he has added organ music—`Death and the Maiden' from All that Fall—which strikes me as eccentric).

In between five separate performances of Breath (which, as good jokes go, will not bear repeating), a number of distinguished persons read passages from Beckett's works and drew connections with his life (parting from his mother, death of his father, en- counter with Lucia Joyce etc) which were both demonstrably spurious and in some- what dubious taste. So that, what with one thing and another, not least the spectacle ot six characters in evening dress spouting as they reclined uncomfortably on the garb- age in the middle of the stage, the evening seemed at times to verge on the kind of theatre—'three bangs of the gong, up with the curtain and on stage twelve characters sunk in a frightfully celtic condition of rural hinacy'—with which Myles had so often to contend.

But, though Mr Beckett stayed away in eNery sense, a master is not after all to blame for what his admirers will do in his name; besides the evening was by no means wholly wasted—Siobhan McKenna "as good asMolly Bloom and4handsomely Confirming my prediction of two weeks ago, that she was barn to play the part) as Winnie in Happy Days; Buster Keaton in Film was rare, if not particularly rich and strange; Patrick Magee and Wolf Man- kowitz did some nice things, and so did Mr Wheldon with a spirited rendering of a passage from Watt whose perorations— turd, excrement and the cat's flux—he enunciated with huge gusto. The theatre it- self, to be built by Buckminster Fuller beneath a quadrangle of St Peter's, needs £170,000 of which $170,000 have already been donated by a ss ell-wisher from Chicago; while Mr Warner is even now negotiating with Laurence Harvey to under- write the expenses of five new plays a year. All in all, an admirable venture, and long may it prosper.

Meanwhile, anyone who still doubts that, had Beckett not existed, it would have been necessary to invent him, should repair im- mediately to the Mermaid where Shaw's Apple Cart vividly recalls the tedium of a theatrical formula already threadbare when he turned it topsy-turvey forty years ago. Donald McWhinnie, taking an understand- ably dim view of his text, has chosen to stage what is not so much a production as a reading of the play. Nine actors sit facing the audience for a good two thirds of the evening on nine chairs, strung in a line across the stage, each taking his or her turn to recite while the rest listen with unnaturally rapt attention to speeches which must be among the dullest—the most predictable in content and repetitive in rhythm—that Shaw ever wrote. Occasional interludes of gruff or enervating horseplay persuade me that Mr McWhinnie would have been wiser to do the whole thing in plain clothes as a strictly concert performance. Among an almost

uniformly poor cast, Carmen Munroe as the lovely Ortnthia is a pleasure both to look at and to listen to; and John Neville as King Magnus gives an absorbing practical demonstration of the old adage for actors —that you may tell a master by the ease With wnich he holds an audience when working on such intrinsically unpromising material as this play, or the telephone Oii ectory.

Donald Howarth's Three Months Gone —which transferred last week from the Royal Court to the Duchess, where the management was so kind as to invite me to review it—is an agreeably unassuming, old- fashioned, sentimental comedy, carrying for- ward Mr Howarth's Hanker saga from the point at which earlier plays lett off. oung Alvin Hanker (nicely played by Richard O'Callaghan) here takes up with a homely spinster (Jill Bennett) old enough to be his mother, while her sailor brother (splendidly rakish performance by Alan Lake) tickles his fancy (Diana Dors, truly sumptuous. in- deed a legend come to life, as the golden. hearted tart) with rather more enthusiasm; friendly milkman and family doctor complete the cast; the whole impeccably directed by Ronald Eyre. Still. it is some- thing of a relief to turn to the Ambiance, where the standards of acting and direction are as fastidious, and the choice of plays rather less conservative, than at the Royal Court: Howard Brenton's Heads and The Education of Skinny Spew make a gay and dapper pair with an energy which has long since been sorely missed from the natural- istic form. The next production, opening on 16 March. will be Beckett's Dutiful: Dialogues which, judging by this theatre's past form, should be no mean treat.