Theatre
Telly time
Giles Gordon
Julius Caesar
(Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford- upon-Avon) The Time of Your Life (The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon) Not About Heroes (King's Head)
mot the mighty Julius but a television
screen bestrides Rome like a Colossus in Ron Daniels's opening production of the new Stratford season. It is infiltrated from the flies, like the song sheet in the panto, into the Capitol shortly before Caesar is slaughtered; and the eye is drawn to events enacted there in two dimensions rather than to the same, but actual, events on stage. The gold-clad senators (no towels for togas in Ann Curtis's punk republic costumes) peer at the carving of Lilliput Julius as if they've never seen such drama before. Maybe they've been watching too much television. If the black-and-white projected images (is it RSC or SPQR which can't af- ford a colour set?) weren't above their line of vision I suspect they'd have found the murder more real, seeing it on the box.
The giant screen is equally distracting and misjudged when Brutus and Antony (they shake hands, like sportsmen, between speeches) deliver their funeral orations but it has the advantage of withdrawing atten- tion from the utterly inadequate Antony. David Schofield, dressed as a provincial pop singer, must be taught to speak verse as well as, in other plays by other authors, he can speak prose.
The production fails to communicate a passion for the play, a commitment to its muscled complexity and ironies. The blur- red television images, which show less, not more, of the actors' expressions, is symp- tomatic of Mr Daniels's apparent unease, or perhaps he's jealous of Olivier's Lear. When in doubt, Brecht-beat. Mother Courage's cart appears, and is metamor- phosised into a tent: Farrah's sets, even by his standards, are ugly in texture and form. Nigel Hess's incidental music sneaks in with a sub-Wagner or sub-Strauss sound when something dramatic is about to happen. It's the soundtrack to a B movie. And there's more rhubarbing from the crowd (we'll let you know) than there's been at Stratford for decades.
Most of which is a shame, because there are some distinguished performances fighting to be set free. The Jones family has a field-day: Griffith is an all-seeing Soothsayer who not only sooth says but bears witness, chorus-like, throughout the evening. Gemma makes of Portia much
more than the usual well-bred handmaiden cum bedfellow. Lesley Duff's Calpurnia is a very political animal with a keen sense of self-preservation.
Peter McEnery is the epitome of gentle Brutus. When introduced by Cassius to the other conspirators, he addresses them almost colloquially, having resolved in his mind the rightness of his involvement. The way, with tetchy hand gestures, he restrains the murderers from wading into Antony as' the blue-rinsed boy pores over Caesar's cor- pse is tensely done. He speaks the lines lithely and renders them their proper mean- ing as, of course, does the testy and always dangerous Cassius of Emrys James. Mr James acts with his mouth more than any other actor I can think of. He snarls, bays, growls, insinuates, cajoles, pouts, whines, brays. His lips command, dominate and distort his body as if they're a drawing by Scarfe. Joseph O'Conor is the best Caesar I've seen: meaty, tough, utterly self- confident.
William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life was written, and set, in 1939. It's a romantic, innocent forerunner of Eugene O'Neill's Iceman, which didn't cometh un- til 1946. Both plays are set in bars (Bob Crowley-,s set is terrific, and includes a juke box which sprouts the Stars and Stripes When the jackpot is struck), both peddle dreams through alcohol. Saroyan is a poet, his best play a paean to the optimism of the human spirit.
Nick (a benign John Thaw) treats his San Francisco saloon as a home from home for anyone who drops in, where the regulars believe dreams sooner than statistics'. He really does want everybody to have a good time, and they nearly all do. It's a rich fruit- cake of a comedy which, in the hands of M. ost other playwrights (Tennessee Williams is an exception), would seem merely sen- timental. Daniel Massey is Joe, one of life's big spenders — 'the more you bet, the more faith you have' — and over a dozen of the best RSC members turn in immaculate Character studies. The cop who tries to keep the whores out of the bar (Zoe Wanamaker has an anguished heart of gold) receives his comeuppance for trying to inject a spot of reality. He's shot dead by Kit Carson: a wonderfully deadpan performance by an actor new to me, John Cater. Howard Davies has orchestrated proceedings with Precision and relish. As Joe says: 'We were In love. At least I was. You never know about anyone else.' This happiest of plays is filled with lines like that.
Back in London, Stephen MacDonald's Not About Heroes — illustrated recital rather than play; and that is not meant to Put it down — is about the mutal admira- tion between Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred °wen. It shows less that genius can't be depicted on stage than that the younger, working-class, provincial Owen is a greater Poet than aristocratic, cultured, worldly- wise Sassoon. Siegfried — mentor though ts to Wilfred — in Mr MacDonald's own intelligent, nervy performance realises this trom, almost, his first defensive meeting with the admiring and unpublished Owen at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh where both were incarcerated in 1917. Mr MacDonald is most moving, suppressing any envy Sassoon might have felt at recognising Owen's originality, settling for reflected glory, realising (later) that his own autobiographical novels were more highly thought of than most of his poetry, and sur- viving to 1967: his friend was killed in the last week of the Great War, aged 25. James Telfer as Owen is quietly effective and truth-seeking in Eric Standidge's austerely effective Dundee Rep production.
The evening — illuminating, instructive and humbling — shows that whatever an artist's background, education, friend- ships, reading, sexual hang-ups, poems that are destined to survive come about through hard work; it's more getting the words right then waiting for inspiration.
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