Last Round
NOBODY seems able to make up his mind whether Mr. Coward has finally, after taking tremendous punishment, taken the count from the zeitgeist, or whether it is the passing of the years and consequent fear of rupture that now prevents him kicking his black suede heels. My own money is on the zeitgeist; the old bruiser has never looked more brutally repulsive and Mr. Coward has understandably taken fright. He has in the past relied chiefly on manners for his defence, but his opponent has lately developed a wicked left hook which has demolished this part of his technique, and in Nude with Violin we see him battling bravely with only situation to save him. A painter dies, leaving behind him an inter- national reputation, a family out for the loot and a suave and polyglot gentleman's gentle- man who discloses that his employer had, in fact, never painted a picture in his life. This is a stroke which makes an immediate impact but it is incapable of development; at any rate it is beyond Mr. Coward's ingenuity to 'do more than expose in due time, aimlessly but pleasantly enough, the true authors of the Master's four, periods. They are all introduced with superbly timed elegance by John Gielgud, who plays the valet—two of them, Patience Collier as a manic Russian princess and Kathleen Harrison as one of Mr. Coward's golden-hearted old-trouper types, being worth the introduction. The rest have at least mastered the basic art of acting in this sort of play, that of sitting cattily, but they are hampered by the author's and John Gielgud's production which resembles a game of musical chairs. It is definitely premature to trample on Mr. Coward's grave as some have done recently, but the time has certainly come for pious relatives to rally to the ringside before it is too late; the zeitgeist is still squaring up at him.
I doubt whether the plays of Eugene Ionesco are equally at the mercy of the times. It is true that The Bald Primadonna depends to some extent on manners, but the case fore its timelessness is already won. For though they are the manners of English suburbia forty years ago and the masochist-nationalist will find in the play the joys he got from Major Thompson and Drole de Drame, it is funny chiefly because of its zany inconsequentialities. One must imagine 'She went into the garden to cut cabbages to make an apple pie . . translated to action. As in the case of that great monologue the joke depends on the faint vestiges of rationality imbedded in the wildest lack of reason, though to set down the train of thought here would be as impossible as to discover what the Dalai Lama and Liberate have in common. In the same way while The New Tenant (in the same programme) will have the amateur psychologist rolling in the gangways over its gentle dig at the back-to- the-womb tendencies of modern man, it is lastingly funny, thanks to the much older (and simpler) joke—the long-drawn-out cramming of several pantechnicons full of furniture into a single tiny room. The secret of acting this kind of thing is to show not the faintest sign of surprise whatever happens; to assume that the world of maniacs has coherence and by sheer force of personality to make the audience believe that it is if anything more coherent than their own. The evening would be well worth while if only for the pans of the Arts Theatre Club which are dead as mutton. Among these it is difficult to choose except that Robert Eddison as the hero of both plays shines with a dedicated lunacy which observes with exquisite care principles of thought and conduct so remote that the audience can laugh at them and so serious that it is clearly the , audience which is mad.
It is not too late for those on the spot who have not already done so to take note of Elias Canetti's play in Oxford. The play, though occasionally opaque and often illogical, fol- lows out very interestingly the implications of its theme; and the production and acting are well up to the new Playhouse standards.
DAVID WATT
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