Theatre
The fat and the lean
Kenneth Hurren
It is easily possible to gain an impression from some drama reviewers — working, curiously, at opposite extremes of the press spectrum: on the one hand earnest, wintry newspapers, slavishly concerned with felicity and syntax, on the whole rather less pugnaciously radical than they are; and, on the other, the wayward, semiliterate organs associated with that segment of society loosely described as ' alternative ' or ' underground ' — it is easily possible, as I was saying, to gain from these commentators an impression that the commercial theatre is a cooked goose. Salvation, if it can be hoped for at all, will be found only within the portals of the subsidised houses, where drama is meaningful and relevant and committed (never mind that it can very often bore your ears off), and the soul-satisfactions of playwrights and their dedicated interpreters take proper precedence over the base profit motive (sometimes known as pleasing the audience) that has corrupted Shaftesbury Avenue.
Taking, myself, a detached view of the main and disparate elements of contemporary theatre (even regarding them as more complementary than conflicting), I have found my heart bleeding a little this past week or so for those who have devoted themselves inalienably and exclusively to the cause of the subsidised branch. It would be mean to dwell again upon the disasters that struck us at the Royal Court (Osborne's A Sense of Detachment) and the Aldwych (Arden's The Island of the Mighty); I merely mention them in passing and commend narrower observers to a consideration of motes and beams.
It was what happened next—or, rather, the two things that happened next — that struck me as more pertinent to the question at hand: that is, the continuing acumen of commercial impresarios in spotting a new and genuine talent. This was nicely demonstrated by Mr Michael Codron, who presented a piece called My Fat Friend, by Charles Laurence, at the Globe; it is superior in every way to another comedy by another new writer, Owners by Caryl Churchill, which is offered in the Royal Court's elevated annexe, the Theatre Upstairs, and which I feel sure Codron would have rejected.
I'm not saying that Miss Churchill's work is negligible; God knows I've seen a lot worse. Its title has a Galsworthian echo, but the play belongs to an earlier day than that. It has, to be sure, its trendy trappings, being set in an area of North London where property speculators, mining a rich seam, are busily converting slums into fashionable pads; there is a readily discernible influence of the late Joe Orton in both the conversation and behaviour of one comic character, just as another is an amalgam of two of Dylan Thomas's (Butcher Beynon and Mr Pugh); but the tale it tells is an old-fashioned melodrama about a wicked landlord's efforts to evict a penurious young couple, differing from the Victorian model only in that the villain is a woman (with lecherous designs on the young husband) and in that it is so awkwardly and episodically told.
No doubt Miss Churchill deserves encouragement but it is Laurence's play that deserved production. Codron, undismayed even by Laurence's association with a terrible television series called Now Take My Wife . . . , plainly perceived that this is a writer not only with a lively and inventive wit that is something more than an ingenious rearrangement of clichés, but with a skill —comparable to that of America's Neil Simon — in organising an original comic situation to yield laughs in neatly-spaced profusion and to wind up making a point about human relationships which is cud to be chewed or eschewed as the fancy takes you. His play, I'd better mention, chiefly involves an overweight girl (the beguiling Jennie Linden, suitably upholstered) and an effeminate civil servant, played with flouncing brilliance by Kenneth Williams. Comedy is the public face of private agony, and Laurence has an instinctive feeling for it. His sprightly case for the preservation of those pernicious terbples of commercialism along the West End boulevards could hardly have been put at a more valuably tactless moment.
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