Theatre
Lost Secret
By BAMBER GASCOIGNE The Secret of the World.
(Theatre Royal, Stratford E.) THE first act of Ted Allan's The Secret of the World is about a man called Sam Alexander whose faith in Com- munism is shattered by Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress. The last act is about a family trying to live with a man called Sam Alexander who has gone out of his mind. But there is nothing at the start to suggest that loss of faith for this man is likely to result in loss of reason, and the final scene need have been no different if the origins of his condition were congenital or even syphilitic. When he calls his young daughter a whore, for example, in front of her boy-friend just because he has seen them kissing, the nature of his mad- ness seems fairly remote from the Twentieth Party Congress.
Somewhere between these two acts—either in the very unsatisfactory middle act or, more likely, during one of the two intervals—Mr. Allan has made an abrupt change of gear. To cover the sound of grating cogs, he throws in a wide variety of subsidiary themes and events culled from the much frequented archives of middle-class family drama. Possessive mother tries to stop son leaving home for better job. Father puts work above wife and even absent-mindedly holds a meeting in the living room on one of her special poker nights. Mother fights continuously with daughter, who idolises father and has pretentious young friends. Lodger creeps stealthily in and out. Grandad is an eccentric.
At the time these incidents seemed mere pad- ding and, for the most part, clichés; but in retro- spect I can see that Mr. Allan was trying to use them, together with a tasteful dressing of symbols, to give his play, intellectually, the shape which it lacks dramatically. All these people around Sam drift into workable compromises with life. His son goes off to a prosperous job in New York. His father, a one-time labour leader, now gets enjoy- ment out of playing a barrel-organ on the streets. His colleague in union politics assimilates de-Stalinisation and stays with the Party. Even his daughter, who is the one most like himself, grimly makes her decision at the very end of the play and insists on having him certified insane.
Sam alone is unable to cope, because he is an idealist—in the rather special sense that he needs to give himself wholly to an idea. When the idea of Russian Communism fails him, he latches on to the belief that his own pure brand of Socialism will rally the union members behind him. When he is thurnpingly defeated in the ensuing election, he collapses into apathy and despair—even to the extent of letting himself be run down by a bus. But when the insurance money comes, instead of buying a nice little shop as his wife hope's, he puts it all into a new hare-brained idea—that everyone wants expandable cuff-links, which he can fabri- cate with two buttons and a spring, and that he will soon make a fortune. He goes on the streets to sell these objects, and when nobody will buy a single pair, lapses into his final madness.
His idealism is brought out by the author in two central images—the mountain behind his house in .Montreal (a real mountain where you can walk and climb and ski right in the middle of a grimy city), and a pet canary. Dur,ipg the play the canary is killed by a cat. The son's reaction to this is that cats have killed canaries before now. The daughter's boy-friend, a younger version of Sam, says that there is no reason why this should be so—cats can be taught to live peacefully with canaries. Sam himself puts one yellow feather in a box and calls it 'the secret of the world'— cruelty and injustice are the natural order. The exaggerated simplicity of this con- clusion, as the only alternative to the false hopes of Communism, signifies the weakness of the hero and of the whole play. It need not have been the weakness of the play if the author had himself made a more definite moral judgment on his material, but there is no way of telling whether he believes that all idealism must lead to madness; and, if so, whether he considers this a comment on idealism or on the world. Conversely, does he think the decision of his other characters to accept the world and to live within it is wise or tragic? Not only are these questions unanswered in the play, but Mr. Allan even seems unaware that they must be asked.
John Berry, who also directs, is as convincing as is possible in the role of Sam Alexander, but the evening belongs to the two women—to Miriam Karlin who is extremely funny as the brassy momma but also rises magnificently to the sob of fury and incomprehension which ends the ,play; and to Susan Maryott, a young actress of charm and precision who plays the daughter.
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