Amazing scenes ARTS

HILARY SPURLING

The Rome Stabile Theatre puts me in mind, like all other visiting Italian companies to date, of a few cold words of Elinor Glyn to a small boy in trouble: 'It is vanity that makes you cry. Pride would prevent it.' The pride of the Italians on the stage is equalled only by the Japanese. If it could, it would have cracked on contact with Naples by Day, Naples by Night, a double bill by Raffaele Viviani which opened last Monday at the Aldwych.

Toledo at Night is the test-case: an unlikely tale of young love and poignant age set among the folk—beggars, ballad singers, sellers of weed; golden-hearted tarts and a little old coffee vendor. There is even a live woolly dog.

It suggests, in short, a tissue of every cliché known to western man and especially beloved of the modern theatre—the kind of complacent international sentimentality barred by neither the Atlantic nor the Iron Curtain : we have seen it already, Slavonically glum, in the Czech mime troupe three weeks ago; we saw it last week, with a sogginess peculiarly Gallic, in Francois Billetdoux; and we know it well enough on all sides at home.

What we seldom see is the kind of nerve, the courage and concentration which make Giuseppe Patroni Griffi's production so exhilar- ating. 'Not for an instant does the writer indulge in the pathos; everything in the act is exas- perating, everything is admirably unpleasant,' says Gino Capriolo, quoted in the programme.

He might have said the same of the director.

Every detail—the richness of the singing voices, the tartness of the songs, the pinched features of the old, cold coffee vendor—stands out with a lucidity not easily achieved on ground which has been trampled so heavily and often.

And not the least of the pleasures of this extra- ordinary production is this sense of danger, of walking a thin wire between, on the one hand, a smug pretentiousness and, on the other, the glum jollity, the easy tears that generally make these affairs so uniquely lowering.

For one thing, it is ravishing to look at: a spiv sidles by in spats and matching hat of raspberry pink felt; a livid, white-faced, bony tart stands watching, arms akimbo, her silk wrapper falling in the folds of a Greek statue.

One of the charms of Viviani's play is the subtle accuracy of this relationship between pimp and whore: luscious Ines (Angela Luce), wiggling one plump, gartered thigh, so volup- tuously bold and yet suddenly so humble when it comes to her fascinating spiv. Watch Tom- masino strop his razor for the carve-up- circling with his rival in elaborate and elegant preamble; for all the world like two coquettish prima donnas preparing to give tongue; or watch Filiberto's gang of lordly thugs, so louche, so smooth and self-admiring in their wide suits and natty pumps. They are menacing chiefly for their habit, like Brecht's gangsters, of moving as one man, with all the abject cowardice and mass brutality that it implies. But nothing is explicit in this production : even the dog, solemnly dispatched by his aged owner on private, nefarious errands, has his own absurd, elusive mystery. Hints at the sleazy and the vicious are in- souciantly veiled: your hood with the slit eyes and hide as tough, and as ominously blank, as a hippopotamus' face, wears a flower behind his ear.

Toledo at Night was written in 1918; The Music of the Blind some ten years later. Again the same dangerously slender formal means— five blind musicians silhouetted against a pale pink sky—achieve the same equivocal effect.

For, if Viviani's brisk, flashy, music-hall gangsters suggest Brecht before his lime, he has also Pirandello's ferocity and the same peculiarly sinister, Italian ambiguity : in the strained and rigid listening poses of the five blind men, and in the tune, at once grotesque and plaintive, with which he perfectly encap- sulates the sweet, sentimental music of a seaside strolling band.

The bass-player, a shambling, ancient Pagliacci who suspects his wife, speaks in a muted, shrill falsetto—a voice oddly blanched and straggling, like a plant in darkness. And somehow one hears the tawdry plot unfold, listening, with the heightened sensitivity of the blind, to this strange voice twittering venomous insults, to the first violent discord when, in a frenzy, he blunders against his• instrument, to the flurry of activity from the band when he bellows 'Traviata!' at his faithless wife; or to the malevolent cackles of the oyster-seller—a brilliant stroke to make this agent of pure evil, whose lies activate the plot, so horribly young and handsome—collapsed over a bollard, draped upside-down and rocking gently in enjoyment of each fresh brutal twist.

'Traviata?' roars our hero, as the band strikes up, 'No! I was talking to my wife.' The plot, like Beckett's in Play, is from grand opera; the curious concentration comes from the same hopeless gulf between these shabby destitutes and their strangely lurid dreams, between our hero's fantasy of jealousy, passion, betrayal, and his squat, squint-eyed, chaste wife. Watch him fiddling by mistake, in mad blind spite and with ingratiating unction intended for non- existent passers-by, to a blank grey wall. Franco Sportelli as the bass-player, Mariano Rigillo as the oyster-seller, Corrado Annicelli as the one- eyed man who leads the blind, all give superb performances; and Rosita Pisano, as the wretched wife, turns her rheumatic waddle— as of an ill-stuffed but obstinate, upright, greenish bolster—into a thing of extraordinary beauty.

There is something of the same heady imaginative power, where you might least expect to find it, in Sweet Charity at the Prince of Wales. Only this time the contrast is in reverse—between, on the one hand, the girls' tough, brutal faces, their casual, lascivious and brilliantly inventive poses, and, on the other, their prim, drab dreams of bliss, as hat-check girl or assistant dental nurse. Gretchen Wyler last week replaced Juliet Prowse in a slightly muted version of what was always a pleasant, but never a startlingly original, creation. Paula Kelly still gives one of the most elegantly finished and delicately felt performances to be seen anywhere in London; and the dances do for New York in the 'sixties what Mr Griffi has done for the Italian 'twenties.

And, also last week, the West End produced its own small native plum, in Terence Rattigan's The Sleeping Prince (St Martin's). The sturdy symmetry of this piece, its structural grace and unfailing dramatic tact—in itself a form of purely theatrical intelligence—have received scant attention. The plot—dewy-eyed America, in white net, confronting portly, cynical and ruse old Europe—comes straight from Henry James; the style—pearls, tiaras, restive Balkan mobs and Grand Ducal protocol all lavishly laid on—is purest Ruritania; and the upshot of this audacious combination—the First World War staved off three years ahead of schedule by a woman's artless wile—is appropriately bold. This kind of polished lunacy is eminently suited to the well-made play, and few were ever better made than this late perfect fruit of a dead style.

Unhappily few of the actors match their author's feathery touch : only, in fact, Susan Hampshire in a deliciously humorous per- formance as our heroine; David Hutcheson who was born to play the man from the FO; and Rosalind Atkinson, as the leathery, tremu- lous and woefully maltreated Countess von and zu Meissenbronn, commonly known as 'that idiot Maude.' At a time when the riches of the world are spread before us, and considering how little our native playwrights have achieved in the fourteen years since Mr Rattigan pro- duced this homely gem, The Sleeping Prince is scarcely to be sneezed at.