True' romance ARTS
HILARY SPURLING
It is a huge pleasure, at a time when Iris Mur- doch has recently been so much abused, to wel- come her second play to the West End; especially in a week when The Italian Girl (at Wyndham's) is joined by an equally astute and ingenious production, after so many sad dis- appointments from Messrs Tennent at the Hay- market, of The Importance of Being Earnest. Each is a prime example of an art, seldom mastered and currently despised, at which the West End excels. Each contrives to titillate and pamper the same well-defined middle-class audience—'It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stockbrokers do that ...' says Algie at the Haymarket, and there seemed a palpable stiffening in the stalls—by imparting to familiar situations an absurd, improbable and exotic flavour. This is an art of gratification; and when practised by Wilde or Miss Murdoch with such skill, tact, above all with such formidable intelligence, it becomes an intensely satisfying att.
Not that one should press the comparison ' too far. We are dealing after all with two oppo- site moods, attitudes and tones of voice. Here is Wilde, in answer to a stirring peal on the doorbell : `Ah! that must be Aunt Augusta. Only relatives, or creditors, ever ring in that Wagnerian manner'; it is a compliment to Robert Chetwyn's production that one realises afresh with what uncompromising severity, how ruthlessly and yet how delicately, this play dis- sects the moral values of Aunt Augusta and the society for which she stands. Miss Murdoch by comparison is broad, one might very well say vulgar-1 need music so much,' cries Isabel, listening to Wagner on the gramophone, 'I don't know what I'd do without it. Sometimes I wrap it round me like a wild cloak. . .' And yet the tone here is equally ironic, though from a dif- ferent position and for different ends.
Conversation in The Italian Girl is couched almost exclusively in Isabel's extravagant terms: members of her family are accustomed to describe themselves as scarred, accursed, imprisoned, and bound to one another 'with steely bonds more awful than the bonds of love.' The household is riddled with fear, suspicion, jealousy, lust, violence and betrayal. And yet, when the absurdity of these doings is hesitantly touched on, 'This isn't last week's copy of True Romance, you know,' is the somewhat petulant reply, 'this is Life.'
What makes the evening so delightful is that this so patently is not. Abottion, arson and sudden death are cheerfully absorbed into a whirl of exhilarating activity. This is the phinless brutality of farce—but farce within the terri- tory, among the familiar inhibitions and ten- sions, of the domestic novel; so that, while striving to keep up with the indefatigable. per- mutations of adulterous and fornicating couples, while admiring their ferocious energy and singleminded purpose, one can- still, however faintly, recognise the traits of middle-class existence in the straitened circumstances of a north country vicarage.
And here Val May's production most judi- ciously brings out the shapeliness, the powerful organisation and brisk pace of the play. The set, by Robin Archer, is a miraculous construc- tion of cobwebs, jungly fronds and plastic ivy sprouting over murky paths, with a tiny triangle of grass matting wedged precariously between a false-fronted cardboard turret and a diminu- tive stonemason's yard, to suggest grounds, outhouses and a lawn while—most endearing touch of all—a clump of rushes wilting over the precipitous front of the stage does duty for the enchanted forest and dark pool which figure so largely in the original novel. All this may be taken to reflect a certain naiveté, or perhaps the comparatively slender resources of the Bristol Old Vic Company; but I think not. For this self-consciously festooned and quaintly rustic set exactly corresponds to the synthetic surface of Miss Murdoch's text: to the clichés, the slipshod and unashamedly rank style of all but the first of her eleven novels. James Saunders is co-author of the play but—apart perhaps from that engaging reference to True Romance which I do not remember in the novel—his in- fluence is not readily apparent on this remark- ably faithful adaptation..
What saves the play, as indeed it saved the novel, is simply the fact that the sentimental, stereotyped and unblushingly admiring terms in which Miss Murdoch's characters are habit- ually viewed, gush here not from the novelist herself, but framed and filtered through the con- sciousness of her masculine narrator. And Edmund's mind is prim, humourless and none too sharp. This is a comic device Miss 'Mur- doch has used before and always with success. Here Richard Pasco's performance brilliantly takes its cue from his central presence in the novel—shrinking, appalled, rolling fishy eyes, by turns amazed and thoroughly alarmed at the horrors which he so recklessly and sternly Persists in probing. Beside him, Timothy West as the crude brute who regularly features in this author's pages suggests with infinitely subtle touches—the queasy belch, the anxious patting of an acid stomach, the monstrous chumbling of his jaws—Otto's fleshly nature. Feelings of envy and dislike between these two are most delicately evoked. Between them, Jane Wenham as enigmatic Maggie, the eponymous heroine, gives an equally subtle performance in a fiendishly hard part.
And even the handful of somewhat crude supporting performances work, like the shabby set, on their own ramshackle level—to poke through the shimmering veil which Miss Mur- doch romantically casts over her thrilling men and lovely ladies, over their cars, castles, whiskies, their lush treacle tarts and beds of roses. This production, in short, is deliciously coherent: the crisp plonk .of Otto's fist landing, amid shrilly screaming women, plump on Edmund's eye comes as an ebullient release; and when the good end happily, the bad unhappily, in a swift terminal prize-giving—Otto reformed, Flora redeemed, Isabel liberated, the fey and doom-fraught Levkin whisked from sight, and Edmund munching an apple with his childhood's nanny now magically turned sweetheart—one sees, with Miss Prism, that this is indeed the meaning of fiction.
But what works for Miss Murdoch, and even, by substituting for the glamour of her prose the seedier glamour of theatrical illusion, adds a certain charm, will not work for Wilde: any trace of coarseness in the acting must blunt the lucid precision of his style. Which is why Mr Chetwyn's production is so pleasant. Not that it is entirely-flawless—Helen Weir's Gwendolen makes heavy going and so notably does Daniel Massey as John Worthing. But Michael 'Annals's sets are ravishing; Isabel Jeans as Lady Brack- nell shows a pretty greed; and the whole is radiant with the plump complacency, the vigor- ous mutual satisfaction of Cecily and her fond Algernon : Pauline Collins and John Standing, doting rightly on themselves and on each other, are a pair who dote to admiration.
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