The Strange Case of Martin Richter (Hamp-
THEATRE
Stranger things
HILARY SPURLING
stead Theatre Club)
The Beard (Royal Court) The Hero Rises Up (Roundhouse) Wonder (Ica Nash House) The Cocktail Party (Wyndhams) It is not often these days that one meets a truly gruesome tale of mystery and imagination, and yet one would be hard put to it to name a finer example of the genre than Stanley Eve- ling's Strange Case of Martin Richter. This sinister fable of fanaticism, treachery and terror opens, as all horrid stories should, in a solid, comfortable, dull red study, complete with suave and plainly dangerous butler. Even the green translucent panels, inserted on the tiny Hampstead stage for garden scenes, some- how suggest heavy foliage, trapped sunlight, dripping glades where anything may lurk. The murderous butler, departing to dispatch his vic- tim, sidles back with a fat smile, fastidiously wiping clean his pitchfork prongs.
But the most frightful scenes take place, of course, by candlelight. Four banqueters, momentarily frozen, cast huge antlered silhou- ettes on the wall behind a grinning boar's head on a meat dish, red stains splash- ing the white cloth below. Best of all is the macabre hunt in the garden which opens the third act: the same four figures move in a stealthy, silent dance over a murky stage. Each of the three pursuers holds a candle so that we see only their bulging shadows, occasionally a face in a cupped flame as two of the hunters collide and part again, hear only heavy breath- ing, muffled footsteps, and sense rather than see the presence of the quarry as he stalks his hunters in the darkness at their back.
If these scenes are strangely gripping, it is thanks in part to the boldness and economy of Michael Blakemore's production, to Rodney Ford's uncommonly fine sets and to a per- formance of mesmeric intensity from Leonard Rossiter as the butler, Richter. But also to the assurance, the lucidity and emotional subtlety of what I take to be a very remarkable play indeed. Ostensibly it is a fairly straightforward parable, of a kind the experienced playgoer will know and dread, concerning the rise and fall of a neo-Nazi party in a flourishing German household staffed by dependable ex-Nazis. These rally to -the butler and his fictitious National Health Party, overthrow their master—one Gummel, a bland, sinister and deeply am- bivalent figure, played with extraordinary authority by Tony Steedman—cage, torture and apparently kill him. It later emerges that Gummel is not dead, that the arch-fiend Richter is himself a Jew (or Schwabian, for the pur- poses of the play), and that the whole elaborate structure was evolved by him to wreak a tor-
tuous—and, for once, quite genuine—revenge. But questions of reality and fantasy, or even of whose fantasy is whose, are not so easily
resolved. Take, for instance, the maudlin jollity of the banquet scene in which Richter's three followers relive their past, monstrous fantasies they once acted out in fact, and which cul- minates in an eerie, servile and adoring evoca- tion of Hitler as cult-figure. Watch Richter, gloating in the shadows, at first impassive and then with gathering excitement—an excitement which feeds on theirs to stir in him a cruelty,
an atrocious pleasure which gradually ex-
tinguishes his own memories of suffering and persecution. So that, as the others close on him and Richter turns at bay in one of those sudden shifts of power on which the play hinges, the revelation that he is a Jew is in a sense willed by Richter and necessary to him.
Hence the peculiar tension of the hunt which follows, the victim's menacing composure and the hunters' terror. Hence, too, Richter's self- possession in the strange last scene, when Gummel reappears to mete out retribution: the treachery, hypocrisy and abject cowardice of his fellows contrast curiously with Richter's sombre pain and grief. And that extraordinary moment, when he fumbles meekly for his butling gloves, becomes a token of acceptance, not simply that his dreams of vengeance have collapsed, but that the past is past in earnest. In fact, this return to a placid, well-heeled normality—the establishment once more run- ning smoothly, this time on a basis not so much of fear as of greed and mutual self-interest— is perhaps the most intolerable, because the most persuasive, in the play. Its effect, on the first night in Berlin, must have been weird in the extreme. It is this uncomfortable honesty, together with a delicacy and an intelligence to which we are scarcely accustomed on the stage, which puts Mr Eveling high among the minute band of contemporary English playwrights who deserve attention; two more of his plays are to open at the Open Space next month.
Mr Eveling's arrival is all the more agreeable in a week which brings Michael McClure's The Beard to London, after a somewhat trying passage in San Francisco and New York. It makes an entrancing evening, whether for the formal sophistication of the text, the visual elegance of Rip Torn's production or the scintillating polish of the acting. Billie Dixon plays Jean Harlow in white curls and silver sheath; Richard Bright makes an equally sleek, pampered and seductive Billy the Kid. Dumped side by side on high thrones in a sadly vacant limbo, these two peer morosely down the aeons: hard to tell which is the more provok- ing, the unaccustomed lack of fans or the exasperating presence of each other. But, from glum self-absorption and mutual contempt, they move to a reluctant courtship—Harlow cocking a shapely thigh, Billy crossly urging an equally plump leg on hers—and finally to a selfless mutual satisfaction. The whole accomplished in a number of precisely noted variations on a handful of phrases, cadences, inflexions; it is a charming, admirably improving tale, and delectable to look at. Elsewhere, the Ica's two offerings—The Hero Rises Up by John Arden, I Wonder by Adrian Henri and Michael Kustow—are remarkable chiefly for what, even on recent form, is an astonishing new level of banality, pretentious- ness and technical incompetence. But happily The Cocktail Party has come from Chichester to the West End where it should on no account be missed, being in point of grace, wit, ex- quisite finish to smooth high power, incompar- ably the loveliest of them all.
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