Mystification
THERE is nothing for it but to you the facts. The scene n' Mademoiselle Jaire is an Easter' city as it might be imagined hY medimval Flanders (minarets and Breughelish hats). The daughter of Jaire, a rich but old' womanish merchant, lies dying,. much to thc, self-pitying distress of her father, mother Ole fiancé. A revolting old priest, a mercenarY doctor and a giggling witch called in for their assistance are of no avail and the girl dies. Her grief-stricken lover refuses to accept the situation and calls in a dangerous religious fanatic with red hair who, protesting that he is Only doing it to make trouble, performs the necessarY miracle : the lady rises from her bier. The experi- ment,alas, is not a success—the girl is a schizophre• nic nuisance given to pelting unsuitable people Witll snowballs and failing to recognise her parents; ill fact, as she and everyone else realises, she would be much better dead again. Fortunately she 15 somewhat comforted by a visit from a man called Lazarus, a moribund fellow-sufferer, who tells her that she will be looked after come the spring, and thereafter she awaits her fate with resign' tion. She finally pegs out with a terrible shriek at precisely 3 p.m. on the day of the execution of the blind irophet.
It will be no shotk to those properly brought up to hear that this is a Miracle play, that it is rid less, in fact, than the story of the raising of Jairus's daughter. This is a good, well found idea navigated with considerable technical skill (as one would
expect from a playwright whose works fill three large volumes); it is navigated with every appear- ance of acute and deliberate enjoyment straight on to shoals of tedium and jagged rocks of in- comprehensibility. This is all very mystifying until one realises that hidden beneath a new and moderately efficient translation by Derek Prouse is a play which dates as recalcitrantly as anY" thing by Galsworthy or Barrie. Written in 1934, it bears all the stigmata—a studied unconvention- ality which uses the stage as if it were a dangerous new toy, plenty of clotted symbolism, a defiantlY `shocking' treatment of a sacred subject, a pre- occupation with Freudian symbolism and Jungian myth. • What is interesting about these mannerisms is not so much that they are present (it would have been very odd if some of them had not been), but that beneath them the significance of the plaY must, strictly, have been quite as obscure in 1934 as it is now; the thing 'simply cannot be Worked out. The difference was that then it did not matter. The play may have said nothing, but it said it in a way that was at the time exciting, and it was in consequence a resounding success. One suspects that lonesco will go the same way. His work does not really make sense, but its impact produces and is calculated to produce thoughts and feelings which any real analysis would laugh out of one's head. Ionesco, .quite legitimately, defies analysis; in twenty years, though, he will probably get it; the spell will have failed to work and a 'Spectacle lonesco' may become a by-word of boredom, poor M. de Ghelderode. Fashionable nonsense has a place in the theatre; unfashionable nonsense is just nonsense. If the choice of the play was not Frank Hauser's happiest, neither is it Minos Volanakis's best production—he appears to have lost his bearings like everyone else, designer, actors, audience.
DAVID WATT
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