Kenneth Hurren on a house of representatives
It's a measure, I suppose, of the flippancy of my approach to the theatre that I am unutterably depressed in contemplation of any work whose author is the subject of an extended 'in depth' interview in the Guardian the day before it opens. Not that I read the things (a generally unnecessary exercise for the pattern varies only in peripheral detail, as, for instance, in whether the dramatist so encouraged to describe his quest for the meaning of life has found his own special Damascus road in leaving or returning to his roots or his wife, his social class or his religious creed); the sombre 'thinker's' pose in the accompanying photograph is usually enough to confirm that a work thought to be of apocalyptic importance is about to be thrust upon us. Since dramatists are not on the whole gifted with any great philosophical insights — or, if they are, do not have the complementary knack of making their insights entertaining — it is hard to suppress a yawn of resignation at this daunting prospect.
There was a moment at the Aldwych at the start of David Mercer's play, Duck Song (which, of course, prompted these glum reflections), when I thought the exception to the rule was at hand. A cuckoo-clock (stage left) began its cheerful announcement of the hour, and an actor (stage right) from being a simple outbreak of vivacity on the part of the character concerned, we were required to interpret the action as indicative not only of his irritation with the cuckoo noises but of his hostility to the whole idea of Time. When a man like Mercer sets about being significant, you can take it from me that he doesn't waste walnuts, and Significant is what he sets about being in Duck Song.
His characters, a small but bizarre group, are soon readily identifiable as Our Society in Microcosm and — the almost inevitable corollary on these occasions — are rarely identifiable as human beings. They inhabit their own version of Heartbreak House (if I may say as much without implying that the house is in the same street), a vast and inordinately cluttered place, quite possibly in Hampstead, which the trendier sort of playwright tends to see as the centre of the world, or at least of Britain. It is a place at once rather grand and rather seedy, kept up by a pair of ageing brothers, inheritors of an industrial fortune. The elder brother, Maurice, epitomises the conservative Establishment, a decent laissez-faire-ish sort who has dabbled in art and left his cultural mark all over the world. The other, Herbert, coquetted quite seriously with socialism in his youth, the affliction in his case taking the form of safe-breaking in a Robin Hood spirit, confining his robbery to the rich (they, after all, being the only people worth robbing); but it transpires that he did not play altogether fair with his working-class accomplice who turns up belligerently to claim his share of the loot, which has been' buried irretrievably under a housing estate. (I hope you're picking ,up all these symbols.)
Herbert's long-estranged wife, Eleanor, also looks in. He had met her in the 'thirties while housebreaking "somewhere behind Harrods" and she had gone along with his ideas for a time in the fashion of the young smart set of that era ("Piddling while Jan-ow marched," is how Mercer puts it), but eventually took off for the less began to pelt it with walnuts. But this was literally just a moment, and I'm very much afraid that, far
ambiguous capitalist climate of the United States. The daughter of this liaison has naturally grown up to be a psychiatrist, an indispensable element of any contem porary microcosm, and she, in turn, has introduced into the household an uncouth young lover, otherwise unemployed, equally indispensable whether he is intended to represent capitalism's victim or simply a mid dle-aged writer's view of the unsavouriness of modern youth. The last member of the party is a Redskin anthropologist, the present husband of Eleanor, who brings with him an outsize buffalo head on the pole, the significance of which eluded me, although it seemed to have something to do with the mysterious explosion which closes the first act. The
result of this is that the house and all the British personnel are stripped of all their possessions except their clothes, while the Redskin keeps his possession (the buffalo head) but loses his clothes and reverts to skins and feathers.
While the conversation up to this point is relatively lucid in a threnodic sort of way and even occasionally comic (without being, as perhaps Mercer would have wished, cosmic), it rapidly thereafter takes on a heavily portentous tone. I wasn't always sure what Mercer was wanting to say, and there were times when I seriously doubted whether he was sure himself; but through the inspissated murk, an acute ear might catch intimations that he has been brooding a lot about death, is generally disenchanted with his old Marxism and is a touch more charitable in his view of the gently-bred, but is romantically putting his trust in the Third World. This may be doing something for his peace of mind, but it isn't doing a lot for his skill as a dramatist, and although there are one or two valiantly confident performances, I doubt whether many patrons will find the work either enlightening or stimulating.
Many reviewers, clearly including this one, have had trouble describing what Duck Song is about. In the case of the new comedy by Peter Nichols, Chez Nous, at the Globe, we are enjoined not to try: it is the management's belief that the play's effect depends vitally on a couple of twists in the first act which should not be revealed. Though they did not seem to me especially surprising, I'm an amenable sort and shall say only that the play is set in a farmhouse in the Dordogne, that it mainly concerns two vacationing couples (played by Albert Finney and Geraldine McEwan, and .Denholm Elliott and Pat Heywood), and that Nichols, exploring their friendship and their marriages and probing a lot of emotional scar tissue, is often wryly perceptive but perhaps rather less inventively funny than in previous plays. He also has a bit of a message, which, if I understand him, is a plea for lowering the age of consent to thirteen. In the circumstances as presented, I was not charmed by his case.
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