Theatre
The good life
Kenneth Hurren
The Pleasure of His Company (Phoenix) Emigres (National Theatre, Young Vic) Apropos Matthew Arnold's reckless division of all the civilised world into Platonists and Aristotelians, an American litterateur once came up with the breezier proposition that all his own countrymen could be divided into two similarly mutually exclusive categories: those who preferred San Francisco and those who preferred Los Angeles. I cannot recall the detailed evidence for the theory, but the gist of his contention was that the San Franciscophiles are by far the most desirable people to have around, recognising as they do the superior graces of the cosmopolitan Golden Gate city, its vitality, culture and general piquancy and therefore probably possessing like virtues themselves, in contrast to the barbarians of Los Angeles who are enthralled by such things as bastardised Spanish architecture and mink-lined swimming pools.
All this brings us circuitously to, and sets the scene of, The Pleasure of His Company, the comedy by Samuel Taylor 'with Cornelia Otis Skinner'. (There is material for an investigative essay on the use of 'with' in connection with the authorship and the directing of plays, a growing habit in the latter activity at Stratfordupon-Avon, where it seems to mean a little more than `assisted by' but not quite the collaboration implied by 'and'.) (Now let me see, where were we ? Oh yes.) The people in this one not only prefer San Francisco but actually live there, in the rich and elegant fashion that allows them to reflect and enjoy all the pleasanter advantages of their chosen city. It is, as you will guess, a graciously civilised caper.
There are, though, two non-residents on hand, vital antagonists in the story before us, one of whom may certainly prefer San Francisco to its gaudier rival down the coast but just as certainly prefers Europe to either, while the other would seem to lie somewhat outside the scope of our urbanised generalisation, since he is addicted to cattle-breeding and more or less indifferent to the charms of city life on any level. The former is the father and the latter the affianced of a young woman whose marriage is imminent as the curtain rises.
The father hasn't been notably assiduous in his paternal responsibilities—indeed, prior to his arrival for the nuptials he has not seen his daughter for fifteen years—but he quickly gets down to the repair of this neglect, to the alarm of his child's mother whom he long ago discarded as a wife, and the chagrin of her intended whom he plainly regards as an uncultured oaf. His own life since abandoning this particular menage has included several other wives, on all of whom his devotion to jet-set hedonism has evidently palled, though his own enthusiasm for it is undiminished and he briskly pitches in to woo his daughter to its pleasures which, he makes no bones about saying, are a great deal more desirable than anything she will find in an existence centred largely on the potency of prize bulls.
This synopsis is almost bound to incline your sympathies to the cause of the young man in the case, who has little cultural conversation, is well out of his depth among the household quotations from the works of Shakespeare, Marvell and Keats, cannot order dinner in French (it is really hard to imagine what he is doing in San Francisco at all) and has no plans for yachting among the isles of Greece, but loves the girl dearly. The errant father, though, despite a certain smugness and arch juvenility, is a man of overpowering charm, especially as played—with indomitable insouciance—by Douglas Fairbanks Jr, who, whatever he may feel about San Francisco, has always himself seemed more at home in the courtlier reaches of European society and I shouldn't be surprised if this were the only role that could have tempted him back to a West End stage after an absence of some four decades. It is a performance of immense style, even managing to hint at some vague awareness of the shallowness of the man's self-indulgent world, however smoothly he extols its advantages. I don't think you'll be too displeased when he succeeds in seducing his daughter away with him in the end.
In case you should be, the calculating Taylor, covering all possibilities, assures us ('with' Miss Skinner) that the fling will do them both good, that she will be back later and will probably marry her young cattleman anyway. The young people are inoffensively played by Belinda Carroll and Michael Howarth, the girl's mother by the sleek Dinah Sheridan, her twinklingly tolerant old grandfather by Wilfrid Hyde White and her stepfather by David Langton, who is discreetly impressive in a fairly thankless part that he must be quite fond of, since he also played it in the first London production seventeen years ago. I might be tempted to say that they don't write wittily superficial, crowd-pleasing comedies of high life like this any more, except that Taylor himself had some success in the same genre with A Touch of Spring only last year. Even so, they are of a rarity entirely disproportionate to the numbers of playgoers who enjoy them.
Those would be, I think, rather different playgoers from those who will lend their earnest ears to Emigres, a duologue by the Polish dramatist, Slawomir Mrozek, for two disparate exiles—one a muscular working-man, the other a socialist intellectual—from some unnamed totalitarian state. Mrozek is not a man for names. We know neither whence his exiles came nor where they are, except that circumstances have thrown them together in some shabby lodgings, and they are identified only as AA and XX. What is relevant is simply their condition as exiles and the re-examination of character, principle and personality that the condition claustrophobically imposes. Tippling in celebration of some New Year's Eve, the two men confront each other like animated pickled onions, stripping off layers of illusions and pretences, cruelly exposing themselves as human flotsam, seeking desperately some formula that will make living tolerable. Brian Cox and Jim Norton, under Kevin Billington's direction, reflect their moods and tensions resourcefully and the play, without ever flaring into theatrical life, is less gruelling than it probably sounds.
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