LAE45 /ANUS EMNU ROYAL COURT
Angry Middle Age
By HILARY SPURLING
'Clutuce, down with them, cut the villains' athroatsIl Ah, whoreson caterpillars, bacon- fed knaves, they hate us youth!' Ten years ago last Monday the English Stage Company was off to a brave start under George Devine, waver- ing a little at first, often down on its luck, often broke until John Osborne arrived with Falstaff's battle-cry. Whooping the company fell upon the ranks of the villainous, grey, bacon-fed establish- ment. New ideas, new material, new playwrights, actors, directors and designers jostled each other on the Royal Court stage and swarmed out on a tide of furious energy to wash away the junk of years and revitalise the English theatre. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, or so at least one gathers—but what about our own dawn now? Ten years ago the Royal Court was a centre of onslaught on a sluggish world, Today the general air of activity in the theatre at large contrasts sharply with gloom and a gritting of teeth in Sloane Square: 'We are trying to put on a show,' said the Chairman, Neville Blond, last week, 'but we are not being successful, let's face it.'
Why not? The reasons put forward are the novelty of the company's aims, the shameful falling-off of audiences, and a dearth of play- wrights. To take the last first, it is true that, with the exception of Mr Osborne, none of the original Royal Court playwrights turned out to be any great shakes. But if, as they say, the company can't find any more (which, with three new playwrights flourishing in the West End at the moment, only means there aren't enough to go round), there is nothing so very terrible in that. In two and half millennia since Aeschylus the Western world has managed to produce as many great dramatists as can be numbered on one set of fingers, and/or toes, depending on how catholic are your tastes, 'Experiment' may be a hallowed word at the Court, but to judge plays, or suspend judgment, on grounds of novelty alone, is not sensible. Of the four new plays mounted this season, one was respectable and unambitious, two long-winded and dull, the• last sheer drivel.
As for the apathy of the public, the answer is obvious. Audiences can't take being lectured or patronised. To be offered an uninspiring choice of plays is bad enough, to be offered them in a spirit of `we know better than you what's good for you' and 'you may not like this, but by golly you're not here to be entertained,' is too much. No one has a duty to go to the theatre. This high-handed attitude afflicts directors, play- wrights and producers alike, and even rubs off on the actors who started out an excellent company and ended up looking as miserable and embarrassed in The Performing Giant as we felt watching them. It is intangible but unmistakable; and there for all to see in pronouncements in the programme, in public fretfulness against audiences who stay away, critics who criticise, anyone who doesn't toe the line on whatever happens to be received doctrine. It lays a dead hand, and not only on the Court; there are creeping traces in the Royal Shakespeare Com-- pang, patently in their shock troops sent out in Jollied-up Shakespeare to colonise the recalcitrant
working classes. Righteous indignation may be cramping as an approach to the world at large, it is fatal on the stage. Yet what else were we asked to feel for the dumb unfortunates in Saved, the goodies in Musgrave? The Cresta Run and The Knack were both deeply patronising to their characters, mini-people who never got a chance to stand up and answer back in their own right.
Lastly, we come to all this talk about being unique in the world, a chosen people, 'perhaps the only subsidised theatre in existence which criticises the establishment.' Who does Mr Gas- kill think is the theatrical establishment in this country, if not the Royal Court? Touchy, lugubrious, embattled, inflexible, middle-aged in outlook if not in years—aren't the company's attitudes precisely those of an establishment, and not so very different from the ones they attacked so gaily all those years ago? Not that anyone would dream of doubting the purity of their motives. The company is evidently deadly earnest in its reforming zeal. But, as so often with mis- sionaries, they have grown set in their ways. Neither their 'criticism' nor their 'experiment' has any apparent end in view. They seem to see themselves as a beleaguered outpost, daring all for fraying standards, still looking back in anger, while the rest of us are unrepentantly living in the present.
The outside world—taking the Arts Council as a rough guide to received opinion—quite plainly supposes the Court to be a branch of the establishment. If the Arts Council went by quality of performance as a criterion for doling out the money, it would have moved heaven and earth to save Stage Sixty last month. But Stage Sixty (the company which opened at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in October 1964 with a brilliant staging of three Euripidean tragedies, and won golden opinions on all sides for their productions throughout that year) is now out of business for want of funds. They began boldly, using English actresses on a poky, picture-frame stage as mourning Trojan women, and turned the chorus from a drag into the highspot of the even- ing. We were amazed. But it was not experimental in the accepted sense which makes a virtue, often the only virtue, out of being unappealing, and they will not have a chance to do it again. Meanwhile, on present showing the Court subsidy cannot have been awarded on any grounds but long-estab- lished name and past reputation.
Good enough reasons, no doubt, and I don't suggest they should receive a penny less, only that they put it to some use. The company bristles with outstanding actors and Mr Gaskill, as we know from past experience, can be a super- lative director. Otherwise there would be no need to play bad fairy at the feast, bringing such a spiteful gift on this happy anniversary. But bad fairies have been known to have a healthy influence (and been at any rate conspicuously un- successful in the long run). The Voysey Inheri- tance, which opened on Monday, proves my point. The company have put themselves literally and figuratively in corsets, cut the cackle, and
* Henry IV, Parts I & 2. (Royal Shakespeare
Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.) - • flourish exceedingly on Granville-Barker's dry wit.
So to Stratford and the RSC, whose vintage Henrys* shine again like a good deed in a naughty world. In a company so skilled in team-work, from the meanest carrier—Neighbour Mugs —to Ian Holm's impressive Hal, the star turn is John Bury. His sets are the work of genius and revolu- tion. Scenes melt and merge with fluency of the cinema, or an Elizabethan playhouse, and 'all the fascination of smooth, silent, powerful machinery. Dank vaults and flickering torch- light for Henry's throne room. An enchanted wood of criss-cross laths for John's treacherous parley between the two army encampments. Sunn■ pink walk, fruit trees, mud, and apples constantly changing hands on Shallow's estate. An underground burrow for Falstaff and his men, warm, dark, beery, safe from the law and the bullets —a brilliant thought to set the Boar's Head below stairs. Best, perhaps, is Hotspur's dream come true in the battle at the end of Part One : The mailed Mars shall on his altar sit Up to the ears in blood.' He sits in the angle between two solid farm buildings, among battered relics of a long peace and a calm world—a hayrack. a cart, a dipper in a bucket. War washes over this quiet corner, as later the Sheriff's men clatter down into the tavern.
Where the production is occasionally sketchy (a Justice, for example, who is shallow in more senses than one) the sets fill in and tide it over; more often the production takes wing from off their back. Tim Wylton's Bardolph leaps to mind, an underwritten part in these two plays, but who here becomes a one-man commentary on Eng- land's ups and downs--communing with his beer in the tavern, breaking silence briefly to advise Hal to rob the exchequer, then up stumps for the war, out across woods and glades, through farm- yards, past giant darkening oaks, and home again, stoical as ever, to Cheapside. Elizabeth Spriggs's Quickly is a treasure, Norman Rodway's Hotspur another, his Pistol not so good. Tony Church, a fine king, is knotted with inner torment from the start. This no doubt to fit in with the directors' stern attitude to Shakespeare's morals, which I can't entirely share, not at least when it makes them side with the Lord Chief Justice against that `abandoned waster of youth.' Paul Rogers' Falstaff seems a trifle damped in consequence. On the other hand I can't find it in my heart to cavil at such an amazing labour of love.
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