Theatre
Codes of Behaviour
By ALAN BRIEN Dock Brief and What Shall We Tell Caroline? By John Mor- timer. (Lyric, Hammersmith.)— Any Other Business? By George Ross and Campbell Singer. (Westminster.) — Romeo and Juliet. (Stratford.) LAST week I argued that contemporary comedy must deal with all those tragic, unspeakable, queasy topics which are too serious for con- temporary tragedy. A good guide for new writers is the Hollywood Morality Code which is bril- liantly designed to catalogue all the hypocrisies of our civilisation with a dead-pan Swiftian irony. I suggested that the lime had come to turn this balderdash inside out, to take this kind of bull by the horns. John Mortimer starts from a similar premiss. He believes that 'comedy is the only thing worth writing in this despairing age provided it's comedy which is truly on the side of the lonely, the neglected and unsuccessful, and plays its part in the lone war against established rules, and against the imposing of an arbitrary code of behaviour on free and unpredictable human beings.'
In his double bill at the Lyric, Hammersmith, Mr. Mortimer sets out as a lodely anarchist to bombard the Establishment with his joke bombs full of indelible soot. Dock Brief couldn't have a more -serious subject : an illiterate, unsuccessful criminal and an expensively educated unsuccessful barrister meeting for the first time in the prison cell before a murder trial. Maurice Denham as the moony, cheese-faced, bird-loving wife-killer, and Michael Hordern as the shambling, dishevelled sheep-dog of an advocate, play their roles like caricatures by Phiz. Their dialogue is stuffed with long, mannered, almost-Victorian sen- tences which explode at every semi-colon with a tiny fizzing banger of a laugh. Mr. Mortimer has a good aim but a short range. Even in a one-act play, it becomes obvious that his characters are refusing to become much more than elaborately comical bit-parts from an unmade Ealing version of a Dickens novel.
It is Mr. Mortimer, in fact, who is 'imposing an arbitrary code of behaviour on free and un- predictable human beings.' Dock Brief is funny, but funny after the fashion of a series of cartoons in Punch: its jokes arc only valid within a rigid cage of conventions. His humour never escapes into real life. What Shall We Tell Caroline? is an attempt at a more universal critical comedy. The basic theme is more than promising—an angry, barking, hairy-tweeded headmaster and his facetious flannelled fool of an assistant have been keeping the headmaster's wife happy for twenty years by acting out an imaginary triangle drama over her affections while the silent daughter has been ripening unnoticed into a woman. But the performance is still never as good as the précis. The fruit cake is buried under towers of highly decorated, violently coloured but ultimately inedible icing. Mr. Mortimer's people become more and more unreal the longer they stay on the stage—until they end up as revue grotesques despite the talents of Michael Hordern, Maurice Denhatn, Brenda Bruce and Marianne Benet.
There are as, many brands of laughter in the theatre as there arc kinds of comedy. John Mor- timer provokes that high-register chuckle and that charming-crinkle-around-the-eyes which results from a gentle tickling of the meninges. N. F. Simpson extorts the true belly laugh which comes from being hit in the solar plexus with a sharp-angled idea. But there is also what John Osborne in Epitaph for George Dillon charac- teristically calls 'the breaking of wind somewhere between the eyebrows and the navel' which comes only at matinees of the old-style farce. For this last variety, which is by no means negligible, I recommend a play I forgot to review in the week of its opening—Breath of Spring by Peter Coke at the Cambridge. This is the one all about upper-class refugees from the Welfare State who take up fur stealing to provide funds for charity. It shoilld be seen if only for Hazel Hughes's hilarious impersonation of a gruff old tin lizzie knitted out of wire wool on number six needles.
Any Other Business? is equally old-fashioned and equally effective in its own way. Some critics seem to have been gulled into categorising it as a new genre—what might be called capitalist- realism—because it is entirely concerned with businessmen at work. But such a theme is by no means rare or special on the stage—even in musicals (example: The Pajama Game). The cinema is stuffed full of examples of heroes who are truck drivers, dockers, farmers, cowboys and criminals. And Any Other Business? is a board- room thriller after the style of Executive Suite. It could have been written by Agatha Christie, but instead of guessing who killed the Hon. 'Cock' Robin, you have to guess who sold out the Old Firm. It is not a who-dun-it but a who-dunned-it : and the authors flourish their red herrings with a matador's skill.
Romeo and Juliet is the oldest-fashioned play of the week and it would be hard to find, outside the works of Shakespeare, a vehicle quite so mawkish, confused, improbable and sluggish which is still wheeled on from the wings. (Who can take seriously a hero called Romeo Montague or a heroine called Juliet Capulet?) Mr. Glen Byam Shaw's production ingeniously emphasises all these weaknesses. Presumably in order to excuse the lovers' infantile inefficiency, he allows Dorothy Tutin to play Juliet as an asthmatic ginger-haired backward child and Richard John- son to play Romeo as an adenoidal overgrown corner-boy. As for me, I played Hookey—that minor character, you may recall, who is borne out on a bier by four programme-sellers during the second interval.
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