ARTS

Sacred cow

KENNETH HURREN

Of all the sad misjudgments of drama criticism in our time, the most appalling, I think, was an error not of ignorant obloquy but of injudicious entlSasm, to wit: the chorus of overpraise lavished upon the pro- ductions of Joan Littlewood in the late 'fifties.

There was explanation, if not excuse. It seas a time of much carefree assault upon establishment' values, and the West End theatre, as I recall, had come in for its share of castigation (some of it just) for its ex- cessive preoccupation with the remote pro- blems of the gently bred. The barbs of the `angry young men' stuck tormentingly in the flesh of reviewers with.no relish for the roles of defenders of artistic sandcastles that seemed about to be washed away by the tide of fashion, and it suddenly became im- portant to establish an awareness of a new and vigorous theatrical radicalism.'

In these desperate circumstances, Miss Littlewood's Theatre Workshop—operating, by appropriate chance, in an East End backstreet—seemed a godsend, and you might easily have had the impression from some of the critics that she had, indeed, been sent by God. The devotional soubriquet, `Our Lady of Angel Lane,' was tenderly bestowed upon her by one fervent proselyte.

Dedicated to bringing 'meaningful' theatre to 'the people,' her raucous exploits had aroused a storming apathy among local residents, but the posh intellectuals from up west, evidently unable to tell a slice of life from a slice of baloney, somehow divined in the crudity, the shoddiness and the chaos a theatre 'in contact with life.' Thenceforth,

Miss Littlewood was their sacred cow. The truth was, of course, that works such as Fings Ain't Wot They Used T' Be and A Taste of Honey were as essentially spurious as any of the despised french-windows-and-

tea-trolley pieces, but they were raw in their language and ramshackle in construction and these things were whimsically lauded as

the new theatrical virtues. Miss Littlewood's approach to direction seemed to be based on the theory that hectic action and incessant uproar can hide the deficiencies of any script, and wondrously she gof away with it.

In the case of the late Brendan Behan, she get her busy little hands on a writer of gen- uine gifts. He wrote one immensely moving

play, The Quare Fellow. He had a coarse, vivid, poetic talent, and the chances are that if The Hostage—never more than a rough

draft—had been rejected with constructive professional suggestions, he might have ap- preciated that drama is as much a product of diligence and discipline as of the spon- taneous combustion of ideas and eloquence. Miss Littlewood, though, was on the crest of

the critical wave. By the application of her usual methods to the palpably unfinished

work, she made a box office success of it; poor Behan wrote no more plays and precious little of anything else. So grotesquely inflated was Miss Littlewood's reputation that, in 1960, the

American writer William Saroyan turned up at the Theatre Workshop as the author of a piece called Sam, the Highest Jumper of Viet': All which, when rehearsals began, was `unfinished' to a rather more spectacular ex- tent: not a single line had been written. The lady assembled her players, and Mr Saroyan got busy thinking of things for them to say to each other. There was an almost engaging impertinence in the admission of the facts about this disastrously improvised enterprise. It has always seemed to me the most typical Joan Littlewood production of all, but her promoters in the reviewing trade were unabashed; and still are.

Their sins would seem more easily forgivable if they had toyed, however lightly, with repentance, but it is unlikely now that this will ever happen. Last week Miss Littlewood was back at Theatre Workshop with a quite abominable show called Forward, Up Your End, which has vaguely to do with municipal corruption in Birm- ingham. There is an' author named in the programme, but I shall respect the-wretched man's privacy, since it is hard to believe he had much to do with any of the goings-on on the stage. The dialogue is insultingly un- fastidious (full of excretory jokes that would hardly entertain an audience of retarded eight-year-olds) and I could have been easily persua$led that it was being made up on the spot by a none-too-confident cast, most of whom had the bewildered look of having been recruited at random from passers-by in the street that very afternoon. The grub- biness and amateurishness of it sent me seething and retching from the theatre, and if anything could shake the allegiance of Miss Littlewood's supporters in the prints it must have been this. Whatever had gone wrong, though, it seems not to have been her fault. I read again of her 'great gifts' and her `genius'—misapplied, perhaps, or over- stretched, but glowing still amid the desola- tion, like the guttering candles lit by her critical acolytes in the ruins of the chapel they built to celebrate her glory.

For myself, I save my genuflections for the stirring professionalism displayed in the

scorned West End in Robert Bolt's Vivut! Viva! Regina! (Piccadilly Theatre), com- mended in these pages by Hilary Spurting when first seen at Chichester last May. This is the one in which Mr Bolt explores the beguiling theory that Elizabeth Tudor saw in her regal rival, Mary Stuart, an enviable mirror-image of the sensuality and femininity she had chosen to suppress in herself in the interests of her monarchy and the state. It is a romantic fancy, conceivably rather hard to justify on the available facts, but Mr Bolt, making an occasional bold historical assumption, sustains it plausibly enough and resists the temptation to sen- timentalise either queen. He has made a number of tactful revisions since Chichester (one or two lines that originally struck me as a little too glib evidently struck him the same way and they've been expunged), and Peter Dews has adapted his fine production to the demands of the proscenium stage with graceful fluency. Eileen Atkins's Elizabeth remains a portrait of enormous subtlety, a fascinatingly complex study of a woman of character and wit, withering bleakly in the loneliness of her barren authority: and Sarah Miles is now immeasurably more confident of her insights into Mary's dilemmas.