Theatre
Meccano Drama
By BAMBER GASCOIGNE
COMEDIANS' faces are often described as mobile; Frankie Howerd's advantage is that he has more than most to mobilise. Spare flesh seems to lurk at numerous vantage points, ready to assemble at a hutment's notice in a new and amazing formation. His act is a ballet of flesh around the one immovable feature, the nose. Not surprisingly, the funniest sequence in his Establishment show is one of pure mime. He merely sits there acting Boredom; he looks at his fingernails, crosses and recrosses his legs, looks at his fingernails again; then he tentatively begins to indulge in the maniac pleasure of dial- ling numbers and quietly listening as the people at the other end get more and more angry and finally slam down the receiver. I could have done with more mime from that slithery face.
Many of his verbal jokes are quite sharp (of the Beyond the Fringe team 'I think they're very clever. I mean, I think they should turn pro- fessional'), but my chief memory at the end of the evening was of his charm. He has an enviable talent for always seeming to be on the side of the audience. He steps on to the stage as some- one who, like us, has been caught up by this fellow Peter Cook and his schemes in the mutual racket of entertaining and being entertained. As a result he gets it both ways. If we like a joke, that's fine; if we don't, we can laugh with him at this terrible business of trying to be funny. So the technique is both part of his charm and a useful safety net. Admittedly there's nothing new about it (it's part of many a music-hall routine), but only in a small club and with some- one of Frankie Howerd'S kvarmth does it seem completely natifral: Like Bea Lillie, who also likes to side with the audience, Frankie Howerd brings on a female accompanist of large proportions and sets her up as a mutual enemy of his and ours. Bea Lillie does this by subtle looks in the direction of the piano; Frankie Howerd by gross asides about the woman's appearance and gloomy sexual prospects. I was just beginning to feel an indignant sympathy for the stout party, when a tremulous fit of giggles slowly suffused her entire being and saved the situation. It was a delightfully cathartic moment. I hope it happens this way every night, but I doubt it.
However much O'Casey may since have dabbled in expressionism or played the cock-a-
doodle-dandy Messiah, it is the mood of his first three plays of the Twenties which still seems most typical. For half the evening Red Roses for Me, written in 1947, returns to this mood. With violence lurking in the Dublin streets outside, characters drift in and out of a tenement house discussing in a stream of blarney the eternal questions of Catholic versus Protestant, Man) versus the apes, home life versus The Cause. The cause this time is not evicting I he English but organising a strike, and in the second half of the play the hero makes a hero's stand against the authorities and dies a hero's death—just as in all those other strike plays written ten years before, in the Thirties. Heroics are out of fashion at the moment and there is one particularly crass-seeming scene where the hero's rhetoric stirs a bunch of beggars (brought on for the occasion) into hope and energy. The message—. that people will rise to greatness at the first whiff of a leader—sits astride the scene like a blanket of lead, but a friend who saw the original production in London assured me that it worked then. Nothing is so ephemeral in the theatre as ideals or theories; but fortunately O'Casey's real brilliance, visible in the first half of this play, lay in qualities less susceptible to the worm of fashion; it lay in the richness Of his characters and their language.
A Dubliner in Red Roses describes something as 'thickly speckled with the lure of foreign entertainment,' which could also aptly describe the best of O'Casey for those who, like myself, are suckers for blarney. Yet even in this there is a vast gap between good O'Casey and bad. At its worst his blarney is nothing but the most corny poeticism. An atheist in Red Roses de- scribes a group called the Catholic Young Men going about with noses long as a snipe's bill, shtripping the gayest rose of its petals in search of a beetle, and sniffing a taint in the freshest breeze blowing in from the sea.
This is splendid, but compare these words in the same play from the hero to his girl; Oh Sheila, our time is not yet come to be serious in the way of our elders. Soon enough to browse with wisdom when Time's grey linger puts a warning speck on the crimson rose of youth. Let no damned frosty .prayer chill lilc sunny sighs that dread the joy of love.
With his eccentric Dublin characters 0.casey seldom puts a foot wrong; but once let him loose in the mouth of a lover or any other idealist and he will soon lapse into the jaded old images of Romanticism. If the hero at the Mermaid (being both lover and strike leader) is neverthejess
almost entirely acceptable, it is chiefly thanks to Donal Donnelly's excellent performance.
I am self-appointed chairman of the CCNP1 (the campaign against contemporary naturalisol for plays of ideas), and hardly a month goes bY without some new still-born drama creeping into my sights. The latest, Ronald Millar's adaptation of C. P. Snow's The New Men, is a perfect speci- men. The dramatic skin is stretched so flimsily on the bones of a well-made problem play that one can see precisely how the skeleton has been formed; the backbone is a physicist's problem of conscience in the nuclear age; the gristle between the vertebrx is the harm done to his marriage by his work; and occasional tit-bits are provided by the comic effects, such as regional horse-play with a Scottish matron or the Cabinet Minister who keeps asking people to 'have a biccy' during his meeting. Like Is,leccano we can take it to pieces just as easily as it was put together (to complete the analogy, good playwriting is more like cooking, where the ingredients fuse inex- tricably). But even apart from the mechanical nature of the construction, the problem with these plays about contemporary dilemmas is that many people will already have pondered the issue more deeply than the playwright can in two hours of compulsive viewing. His efforts are almost cer- tain, therefore, to seem banal. Only by trans- ferring the dilemma to an unfamiliar context can he provide a new perspective or a new depth; which is why I would rather see a badly 'written Galileo than a smoothly executed version of The New Men, both plays being in fact on the same subject. The chief pleasure of the evening was Richard Pasco's performance as a no- nonsense young boffin.
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