THEATRE

The trifling people

HILARY SPURLING

`A trifling song you shall hear, Begun with a trifle and ended; All trifling people draw near, And I shall be nobly attended,' sings Archer in Farquhar's Beaux' Stratagem, and goes on to outline his own and his author's approval of the life of pleasure—wit, malice, style, pretty clothes and scandal. Much the same principles are set down by Joe Orton in a pro- gramme note to his double bill at the Royal Court, which proves one of the more cheerful evenings provided in recent months by that generally gloomy and conservative body.

Mr Orton, like Farquhar, takes a simple delight in being outrageous, in men dressed in drag or undressed altogether, anything to excite the squeamish or prurient; the two share an unmistakable tone, a kind of agreeable friskiness—'What, sir Do you intend to be Rude?' cries Fenella Fielding at Chichester, rearing up joyfully towards the man who bursts in uninvited and starts to unbuckle in her bed- room at two in the morning. Both playwrights enjoy violence and death, which both also use indiscriminately to solve tricky problems of plotting. And both share a special antipathy for authority—aldermen, priests, magistrates in particular, whose shadier side is brought out as a matter of course in their plays—and the law in general: 'they interfere too much in private morals,' explains Mr Orton, 'whether people are having it off in the backs of cars, or smoking marihuana, or doing any of the interesting little things that one does.'

But, beyond all this, the two take a common stand on the great divide which split society in Farquhar's day, and splits it now more effectively than any political party: between, on the one hand, the trifling people, generally depicted as genial, frank, unscrupulous and young, on the other, the drab repressive forces whose views—on divorce, sex, censorship, any of the hundred and one topics which bring out the letter writers in the Daily Telegraph—don't seem to have changed essentially down the centuries. There are obvious advantages, for the dramatist at least, in a period when fashions in dress, morals, social customs are changing fast. Then as now satire and satirists throve; the libertine young were as vociferous and as freely disapproved; and the theatre, which dis- sected the squalid and mercenary intrigues of a society which exacts lip-service for conven- tional morality, flourished briefly as it never has since. There is more than a whiff of all this in the Royal Court programme, where Mr Orton marks out the ground to be explored with a lucidity so far muffled in his plays and with the same gaiety and energy as those ancient prologues and apologies which attacked, in identical terms, the prudes, bigots and hypo- crites of the day.

It was, of course, these people, and the public for whom they spoke, who put a stop for good to the last great period in our drama. In 1707, when Farquhar died at the age of twenty-nine a few weeks after the first night of The Beaux' Stratagem, Congreve had long since written his last play; Otway, Vanbrugh, Wycherley were

all either dead or finished as playwrights. The sentimentalists who have dominated the drama

ever since were already at work, simplifying

and beautifying with platitudes and half-truths. Fkrquhar himself is I broader, more polite—

`sweeter, cleaner, healthier' as William Archer put it—or at least more inoffensive, because less subtle, than Congreve. None the less, for honesty, generosity and intelligence, The Beaux' Stratagem goes beyond practically everything which has been done since.

And here, complaints that William Chappell's production has ignored the lesson of William Gaskill's Recruiting Officer at the National

Theatre seem at best unnecessary. That was a

revolutionary production, designed to make plain what had so long been overlooked, that

squalor and brutality coexist in Restoration comedy along with the extremes of artifice and affectation. But there is no particular or univer- sal virtue in the greasy sweat and grubbiness present in the text; and, without over-emphasis, Mr Chappell has captured precisely the note of callous and good-humoured frankness which marks negotiations between Farquhar's mercenary heroes and palpitating heroines. In the women's parts particularly, this production rises to the heights: Miss Fielding, for instance, as Mrs Sullen closeted with her rude lover in the early hours, picked up bodily in a froth of flounced lavender and born with agitated moues and moans, beating limply at his breast, to- wards the bed and ruin—a climax interrupted, inevitably, by a burglar alarm followed shortly by the burglar in person (ferocious Bill Fraser, of the pock-marks, gap teeth and eye patch).

This moment of giddy surrender, deliciously protracted, is one of Farquhar's specialities, and here he gives three variations on the theme: experience and complaisance in Mrs Sullen's bedroom, rapturous innocence in Maureen O'Brien's Dorinda, the country cousin reeling like a drunk at first sight of a strange beau from London with killing eyes in church; and frankly lascivious in the scenes with Cherry Boniface, the inn-keeper's daughter —Prunella Scales as a gauche and knowing adolescent tumbling with the same rude lover who has designs on Mrs Sullen (Anton Rodgers, who makes up in sardonic sensuality what he lacks in easy charm; John Standing gives an amiable and elegant performance as his partner, Aimwell). The production is trimmed with deliciously frilly costumes by Peter Rice; but Mr Rice, who gave us synthetic stone walling in his set for The Farmer's Wife last week, moves on this week to spoil all with mock flock wallpaper and fake wooden panelling.

A phoneyness, in short, more suited to Mr Orton's world than Farquhar's: that tiny world of bickies, doylies and poppies laid up against Armistice Day which Mr Orton has made pecu- liarly his own. It is this great delight in local foibles, together with an exuberant richness of language which, in both playwrights, offsets their bleak and otherwise intolerable truthful- ness. But Mr Orton has so far been hampered by, first, a certain derivative aimlessness, second the fact that, unlike Farquhar's, his world is not partly but entirely peopled by brutes and simpletons. Unless he can enlarge his territory, the second seems likely to prove an insuperable barrier. The first—which comes out in the banal development of an excellent idea in The Erpingham Camp—has already been largely overcome in the other half of this double bill. The Ruffian on the Stair is the better of the two, precisely because it has been scrupulously reltmorked: what was bathetic, trite and cloaked in a Pinteresque obscurity in the first version, is now made explicit and ironic. The improve- ment, though, is counteracted by a strangely inappropriate devotion to old-fashioned kitchen-sink naturalism on the part of the director, Peter Gill.