REVIEW OF THE ARTS
Kenneth Hurren on the expiring theatre
Babies Grow Old devised by Mike Leigh (ICA Terrace Theatre) Stallerhof by Franz Xaver Kroetz (Hampstead Theatre Club) Aspects of Max Wall (Garrick Theatre) Emlyn Williams as Charles Dickens (Theatre Royal, Haymarket) Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare (Aldwych Theatre) When the theatre eventually dies, it may not be easy to establish the precise cause of death. Natural causes, in the sense of senile decay, may be favoured by the more kindly witnesses, but I daresay there could be others strong for murder or suicide. I might have struck a more cheerful note and said 'if' rather than 'when', but last week in the London playhouses, as seen from a reviewer's seat, did not encourage optimism. Taken in isolation, it i seemed almost wilfully designed n support of the gloomy thesis that the theatre was on its last legs; and, as you will note from the listing above, I didn't even see a thing called Raindog, offered by the Red Buddha Theatre at the Round House (having been intimidated by reports that there was no interval and thus, to the dismay of many auditors, no convenient means of escape) or the performance of Marlene Dietrich, embarked on her latest tour at Wimbledon, since there I had the suspicion, conceivably unjustified, that the last legs might sadly be made flesh. There were, however, intimations enough of mortality, elsewhere. Babies Grow Old, if it should presage a serious trend, is one that might be produced in evidence by proponents of the suicide theory. This is an item widely publicised as having no formal script, having been improvised in rehearsal by the company under their director, Mike Leigh, and the only doubt that could come into anyone's mind would be in regard to the rehearsals: I thought myself that they were probably making it up on the spot. It has to do with an old lady (said to be sixty-eight, though I have known them sprightlier at ninety) who is visited in her somewhat dismal home in Birmingham by her daughter and son-in-law and a couple of their friends. In view of the geriatric condition of Mum, the pregnancy of her daughter and the war wound of one of the friends, and since the other two characters are both young doctors, the conversation turns much, when it turns to anything at all, to medical matters, but is not otherwise remarkable or less humdrum than might be picked up by an eavesdropping tape-recorder any evening in the home of the most uninteresting people you know. As 'theatre,' it struck me as having the death wish written all over it.
Much the same thought, I fear, came upon me in the presence of Stallerhof, which is translated from the German and is like Cold Comfort Farm without the jokes, and beside which The Lower Depths might seem mildly escapist. The folks here are Bavarian peasants, much oppressed by life, a condition indicated by their long silences and stooped backs (the cast could be forgiven for playing on all fours, but they valiantly resist painting the lily so obviously). There is a spastic girl (depressingly well played by Celia Quicke) who is seduced and impregnated by a 'morose farmhand, who is, upon discovery, sent packing. What he packs — in his battered suitcase — is the body of his dead dog, poisoned by the girl's taciturn father. "Not a play to enjoy or necessarily admire," remarked young Nicholas de Jongh in the Guardian in a sauve understatement that he seemed somehow not to regard as pejora tive. There is, I suppose, no reason why the theatre should provide entertainment (and I would accept the broadest possible definition of the term), except perhaps in order to survive. These may, of course, be merely passing misadventures. As to the matter of senility, I should not actually wish to cite Emlyn Williams's Dickens programme in support of it — the show has much in it to enjoy and I commend it to anyone seeking a civilised evening combining literary and histrionic pleasures — but Williams was doing it nearly a quarter of a century ago, and I cannot help but fear for the future of a theatre so reliant upon its past. Max Wall falls within a similar category, only more so, for he has been at his present caper since the music halls were flourishing, and in those days was happily acceptable with twenty funny minutes, second top of the bill, whereas now he has a couple of hours to fill on his own. He has a special place now as the last of the vaudeville drolls, but that may be more than the traffic will bear.
One-man shows are less to be criticised in themselves, though, than deplored as harbingers of a commercial West End theatre that may soon be so strangulated by inflationary costs of production that it will be able to afford little else; and with the Arts Council obliged to tighten purse-strings under justifiable Treasury pressure, the subsidised houses are similarly harassed. The RSC Twelfth Night (reviewed at Stratford last summer) is fun if you can see it with the director, Peter Gill, as a study in narcissism, but this is the fourth production in a row to be brought from Stratford to the Aldwych, which will not be able to mount anything of its own for many a month.
If it is, after all, to be murder, there will be no real culprit other than the general state of the economy which has a lot of carefully budgeted shoes pinching inflationary feet; and the theatre, viewed detachedly, has no special claim on the indulgence of a hard-pressed nation, the present campaign against the VAT burden being largely seen as part of the general arrogance of artistic people. Even so, if the theatre were not seen to be so eager to nail down its own coffin with the likes of Babies Grow Old and Stallerhof, the vigilantes might come running.
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