REVIEW
OF THE ARTS
Kenneth Hurren on a busy night Down Under
What If You Died Tomorrow? by David Williamson (Comedy Theatre) The Bedwinner by Tony Lesser (Royalty Theatre) Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (Aldwych Theatre) Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon).
It crossed my mind, watching David Williamson's play, What If You Died Tomorrow?, as incident piled upon incident, hint upon hint, ambiguity upon ambiguity, and as the characters grew the more frantic in their quiet and unquiet desperation, that Williamson had written it as though he, in fact, might die tomorrow. He had a lot to get off the top, a lot of thoughts about Australian attitudes, 'a lot of high philosophical reflections op Life and Where Are We All Going, and, by God, if he didn't pack it all into this one, he might never have another chance. It is, undeniably, a busy little number.
This is much of its trouble, that it is overloaded with themes and is trying to cover too broad a canvas of observation for its own miniature good. I shouldn't want to make too much of that, though. It is better for a dramatist to be saying too much than to be saying, as too many of them are, nothing at all, and in the course of one hectic and bizarre night in the home of a man reputed to be the most successful popular novelist in the whole history of Antipodean publishing Williamson says, as the word is, a mouthful. Marriage and the family and sex, life and death and insurance, culture and commerce and success, the passing show and the eternal verities: if none of these is precisely the substance of the play, all of them are lurking in its shadows as the world of the protagonist fills up with awful doubts.
The protagonist is this novelist, Andrew Collins, formerly a doctor, who has abandoned medicine in favour of living high on the best-seller list and simultaneous publication in Sydney, London and New York. ("Are you sure you've done the right thing, son?" inquires his sceptical old Dad, prodded by his even more sceptical Mum.) He has also, on the way, abandoned his wife and children in favour of a mistress from the world of journalism (which is, of course, even lower in moral standards than that of publishing), and has taken on her children from the marriage that she herself has abandoned. This new relationship, as we discover it before the evening gets the wheels under it, seems to be working out fairly agreeably in its superficial, bantering, amiably carnal way, although the new children offstage and obstreperous give threat of developing into a major problem and already, it transpires, take a distressful view of their mother's carryings-on with Collins. ("Are you sure you've done the right thing, son?"). There's a problem with the new book, too. Is Harry Bustle, the gabby and grabby publisher who has put our hero into the best-seller list, chiefly perhaps by his own philistine suggestions for adjustments in the narrative line of his last book, the right man to handle his next book? The rival, brought along by Collins's homosexual agent, is a willowy but rather worn lady named Carmel Scott who is probably spoken of in Sydney literary circles as the good time that's been had by all and whose approach to prospective authors might easily raise a few eyebrows even in Bloomsbury. Collins is tempted by her terms, although his father is inevitably worried about whether he is doing the right thing. These doubting parents, by the way, have shown up by well-organised chance on the same night, having just returned from an extended tour of Europe, the cultural treasures of which have not greatly impressed them. Accompanying the homecoming oldtirners is a young Scandinavian fellow who seems ostensibly an irrelevance but, despite the somewhat gaudier behaviour and language of the literary personnel on hand, it's worth keeping an eye on him. For one thing he may well be there as the dramatist's special representative, an appalled outside observer of the society of the instant orgasm and the twentiethcentury sellout to well-heeled hedonism; and for another, he's the only character who comes close to death on the morrow, making an abortive attempt to hang himself. I'm not sure how significant this event is intended to be. Williamson is a great one for teasing little touches of symbolism as, for instance, in Collins's reduction to unexpected impotence in a precipitous living-room grapple with Carmel, and as, for further instance, in his sporadic but not really aimless efforts to build something worthwhile with the children's construction set and there were times when I wished he's just give us the facts and the jokes.
Nevertheless, What If You Died Tomorrow? is arrestingly written, punishingly well acted by Sydney's Old Tote Theatre Company who have brought it to London, and it's a play you'd be foolish to miss, despite the unease it may promote about the advisability of exposing the cream of our young cricketers this winter to the sort of values that Williamson seems to be insisting are running amok in contemporary Australia. Contrastingly, The Bedw inner is as close as a play can get to being about nothing at all. Among the things it isn't about is sex, notwithstanding the heavy suggestiveness of its title. Perhaps for that reason, considering the grubby inanity of modern farce when it is about sex, it passes a couple of hours chucklesomely and relatively inoffensively. Jon Pertwee and Lynda Baron, as a married couple in mild dispute over their domestic arrangements, and Roland Culver as the former's bemused father, are principally involved in it; and there being nothing further usefully to be said of it, I can no longer delay the irksome business of remarking on the latest endeavours of the Royal Shakespeare Company, visited last week upon London and Stratford.
The company would seem to have fallen upon a phase in which they feel it incumbent upon them to put on works they hold in low esteem but which, by dint of ingenious adaptation and direction, they might just about make tolerable for indulgent audiences. In the case of Dr Faustus, John Barton's notion is to expunge the frivolities with the Pope and those other scenes which Hazlitt described as "mean and grovelling" and which no one is going to miss, and to slip in some alternative material elaborated from the English FaustBook, along with some linking narrative of his own, the while encouraging his cast to exploit their gamier opportunities. Ian
McKellen, got up I'm afraid to resemble an increasingly unkempt armpit, never seems exactly to epitomise the spirit of tormented mankind, frustrated by the limitations of mortality, and it may be that the day is gone when it is possible to look at Faustus in that light. If, though, it is to seem DO more than a meretricious fantasy about an egotistic sensualist who strikes a singularly poor bargain. in committing himself to an eternity of torment in exchange for a few conjuring tricks and the favours of a desirable lady or two, it is scarcely worth serious and scholarly attention. Even so, its production is rather less reprehensible than the assault on Measure for Measure, the direction of which has been entrusted to one Keith Hack, newly recruited by the RSC, having doubtless previously displayed somewhere that hostility to Shakespeare which is so valued at Stratford these days. Hack's view of the work as a sort of three-ring Viennese circus is witless, vulgar and trivialising in about equal measures and an insufferable affront to any audiences who may attend in innocent expectation of seeing a play of Shakespeare's.
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