THE SPECTATOR
THEATRE
The rocking-horse loser
KENNETH HURREN
The late Bernard Shaw had a new theatre named after him in London last week, but he had little else going for him, and the most comforting thought I could take away from the Chichester Festival Theatre was that he wasn't still around to know about the indignities visited upon his play, Caesar and Cleopatra, by a director named Robin Phillips and his confederates. Not, of course, that there would have been the remotest chance of Phillips getting his hot and busy little hands on the play in Shaw's lifetime. If the dramatist was tetchy even about Arms and the Man being turned into The Chocolate Soldier, the camping up of his Nile conversation piece in a children's playground could obviously only be accomplished over his dead body. Phillips's production cartwheels derisively over the cadaver, finding a species of mocking inspiration in the play's concern with the • early education of Cleopatra, and turning almost everything into a kindergarten romp. The sixteenyear-old Cleopatra carries a ragdoll around with her (and by this time, for all I know, may be sucking her thumb in moments of stress); Caesar and his centurions bounce across the water astride outsize inflatable balls; a mincing chorus of micro-skirted youths play with hula-hoops between scenes; Apollodorus, the arty carpet-salesman and long-distance swimmer, does an occasional somersault and slides down a shute into the East Harbour, going through a paper hoop on the way; a roundabout is adapted as a throne and there are jellies for tea. Irrelevantly, even in this capering context, a party of straw-hatted oarsmen pass by to the strains of the Eton Boating Song; and for anyone who feels that the verbal anachronisms of Brittanus (Shaw's standard caricature of British respectability) are insuffidiently amusing, he turns up here in a bowler and blue-serge toga.
The play is not really major Shaw, but it is not, either, as minor as it must inevitably appear to anyone who encounters it for the first time in these hapless circumstances. The theme that sustains it, and is more or less lost among Phillips's nursery fixations, is Shaw's view of Caesar as a far greater and more interesting man as a philosophizing politician than he ever was as a soldier. Shaw's account of the conqueror's relationship with Cleopatra doubtless displays a degree of airy disregard for the historical facts, but if he had allowed himself to get too much involved in the racier reports retailed by Plutarch, it would have taken the edge off the urbanity of the arguments he is chiefly concerned to expound, in particular his hero's crucial theory about the value of clemency, not as a matter of sentimental morality but in terms of practical politics. Cleopatra's environment inclines her to a simpler and more bloodthirsty view, and there is a moderate amount of carnage as a result, but at the end there is evidence that she is coming round to responsible queenliness, and that in her maturity she will put away childish things. Which is more, of course, than can be said for Robin Phillips in his.
I was just a little surprised to find John Clements, the head man at Chichester, condoning the contemptuous sport of his tiresome young hireling. It's conceivable, though, that things had reached the point of no return before Clements had fully cottoned on to the facetious preciosity of the travesty to which he was to lend his festival stage; and he may have thought, casting about for a silver lining, that if the Royal Shakespeare Company could get dizzily away with a plate-spinning Oberon on a trapeze, his own place might come in for a bit of leftover acclaim with a Caesar on a rocking-horse: as, indeed, it has, the wayward trade of drama reviewing having fallen so considerably into the hands of men desperate lest they be written-out of the with-in scene, and the hell with oldfashioned notions about respect for men of genius, not to mention the dead.
The presence of John Gielgud in the role of Caesar might be similarly explained by the "point of no return" theory, though it may be just that he has resigned himself to being borne willy-nilly wherever the winds of theatrical trendiness should waft him. I admired, nonetheless, his valiant endeavours to render unto Caesar some, at least, of the things that were Shaw's, and to keep his head when all about him were losing theirs; and never more than in Caesar's opening apostrophe to the Sphinx: Gielgud steps on the stage, regards the thing glumly, notes that it is represented only by a couple of playground slides, and turns away with distaste to address the speech to the audience instead.
Anna Calder-Marshall, a pretty little actress about three feet tall, who often gives the impression of having no neck, is a Cleopatra who gave me the needle from the start, as she attacked her childish lines in a series of staccato squeaks. I could never take her quite seriously as the sleek little kitten who was to grow up into the Serpent of Old Nile, and at the end, as she stood there queening it on the quayside in her floor-length gown, I could only think how much she looked like a melting candle. The rest of the players all deserve some kind of unfavourable mention, but as it can only be a matter of conjecture how much the style of their performances can be attributed to their director, and how much to their own dreams of getting parts in Up Pompeii!, I shall not invade their privacy.
Getting back to the new Shaw Theatre, I hope it will speedily get rid of the dismaying cut-out figure in the foyer (Shaw's head photographed on the cartooned body of Superman), because in other respects it's a fine, tastefully designed and comfortable playhouse. It is primarily intended as a permanent home for Michael Croft's admirable National Youth Theatre, but it has begun operations with a professional production of The Devil's Disciple, which features a carefully studied, keenly ironic and polished performance by Ronald Hines as 'Gentlemanly Johnny' Burgoyne, but is otherwise rather humdrum. I should have expected brisker and tauter direction from Croft on the evidence of his work with his stripling amateurs.
The Marguerite Duras play, The Lovers of Viorne (the mysteriously titled English version of L'Amante Anglaise), at the Royal Court, seems to me a remarkably aimless enterprise. With Peggy Ashcroft so arrestingly moving as the central figure, it might have been acceptable as a serious, though vain, attempt to plumb the psychological depths of Claire Lannes, the Frenchwoman who, apparently at the end of her tether in her life of quiet desperation, murdered her husband and despatched the body to various parts of France by throwing pieces of it into passing railway trucks; but Mlle Duras has changed the woman's victim from her husband to her deaf-mute housekeeper cousin, and I cannot go along with the contention that this fictionalization does not vitally impair the integrity of a work which, as fiction, can only seem exasperatingly inconclusive.
Previous page
