Still, it has its points and its moments, its funny
lines (though not many) and its visual jokes that come off, if always rather too slickly (an Oxfam fund-raising occasion, for instance, contrasts the grotesque glitter with the cause it glitters for, fat women stuffing themselves with sandwiches, idiotically opulent prizes. and 'the final indignity of Negro flunkies in livery and eighteenth-century wigs: tine, if it hadn't been rubbed in quite so hard, and for quite so long). It has another excellent performance by Dirk Bogarde as the man Diana loves who has the strength of mind to get rid of her, and it will pro- vide sociological chitchat even for those to whom it all seems as remote as Patagonia.
Renoir's Routh, sauve des eaux is another of Antony and Cleopatra and Troilus and Cressida. (National Youth Theatre at the Old Vic.) HE Battle of Actium was much enjoyed, once I we had grasped the basic rule that army squads, whatever their allegiance, enter stage-left and exit stage-right. No wonder they never meet. But long before we got to the heavy fighting it was clear that the pleasures of the National Youth Theatre production lay elsewhere—in the soft beds of the East in fact, not where you would expect to find them in any English production, • let alone one' largely run by and for school- children. English Cleopatras, from all accounts, nearly always disappoint—they may excel at coquettish repartee or in swift changes of mood, they rise to moments of majesty and shine briefly in the death scene, but they don't much relish the actual tumbling on the bed of Ptolemy. Deep down, it would appear, their home life isn't really so very different from that of our beloved Queen.
All the more startling, then, to find a Cleo- patra who, with all the usual graces, is riggish to her fingertips. Helen Mirren's Cleopatra is unselfconsciously and immoderately sensual. Fondling her women one moment, threatening to give them bloody teeth the next, bestowing her hand instinctively as her highest favour to be kissed, absently rumpling the hair of one mes- senger, 'mingling •eyes,' as Antony says, with another—her lightest pleasures or displeasures are transmitted through her body. She is borne in on a litter to while away the hours of Antony's absence and, as she stretches luxuriously and caresses her own soft flesh, we feel more strongly than if he were there her invocation of his physi- cal presence. So, when she comes to 'The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch, That hurts and is desir'd,' the phrase needs no particular em- phasis. She says it quite lightly, and in her quiet last moments the past is re-created as vividly as if we had gone back two hours. For once we can believe in a Cleopatra who 'takes no pleasure in aught an eunuch has' and who, when it comes to the pinch, kills herself at last to prevent Antony kissing Iras first in the Elysian fields.
Not everybody's cup of tea. The kind of Cleo- patra we really understand is Betty Marsden's version in The Overdo,—one of the few com- pensations in a play which it would otherwise be kind to ignore. Miss Marsden as Cleopatra is also hell-bent on seduction, also wearing a black fringed wig and white drapes, also borne in on a litter, and also a competent actress wholly mistress of the situation. But there yawns the THEATRE his 'thirties films that mysteriously hasn't been shown here before. For fans of Renoir, the 'thirties, or Michel Simon, it has everything. Boudu is a tramp; the French cinema is fond of tramps and between them Simon and Gabin have covered a wide range of whiskery indepen- dents. lamais vu• un clochard si bien rdussi,' someone murmurs as Simon goes by. which is Renoir being slyly self-satirical, perhaps; for this is about the most histrionic tramp since Prince Monolulu. Fished out from drowning by a benevolent bookseller, he is taken up. cleaned up, and practically married off by a bourgeois family in spite of his protests, his ingratitude and a determination to sleep on the floor. On the way to his wedding (by water) he overturns the boat and manages to float away to his old life; pinches clothes off a scarecrow, chucks his bowler in the river, and ends sharing a bite of something with a friendly goat. ISABEL QU1GLY
gulf. Miss Marsden's white drape is a classic evening gown by Mr. Lancaster out of Lady Littlehampton's wardrobe. Her face has that tinge of purple under white much favoured by English women of a certain age. Her intentions are foredoomed. 'I know you're sweating to get at me,' she croaks as she closes in on young, handsome, sun-tanned Derek Godfrey—a get- away person if ever there was one. We were undoubtedly on home ground, even if we didn't laugh like drains.
Miss Mirren, of course, is not experienced ' enough to play Cleopatra and we can't always forget that she is nineteen years old. But under her influence the court of Egypt has an air of bawdy luxury, of relaxed and tingling sensuality, which dominates the first part of the play; and the images of physical decay—Cleopatra as a blown rose to stop the nose at, as `a morsel, cold upon dead Caesar's trencher,' as a corpse— 'on Nilus' mud Lay me stark-nak'd, and let the water-flies Blow me into abhorring'—stand out from the second half. Decomposition indis- solubly linked with the sweet prime of the' flesh. A foreign thought, but undeniably Shakespeare's.
The memories that stick are of Cleopatra, soft, white and still, gravely upright in the centre of her wide stone throne. Or huddled at one side of it, gazing as if she would never look away at the basket of figs, while the countryman who brought them chunters obliviously on about the habits of his pretty, mortal worm. Here we seem to have an actress potentially quite outside the English tradition, at any rate since the heyday of Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Bracegirdle in the eighteenth century. At the end, of the week the state ought to have been there, pressing forward With its cheque-book to offer her the finest training that money can buy. Perhaps it was. It is not as though we were suffering from a surplus of young actresses capable of giving us a real treat in Restoration comedy.
Stark Naked upon Nilus' Mud
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