Theatre
Peace in Our Time (Touring Partnership) The Cars That Ate Paris (Perth Car Park) Dead White Males (Sydney Opera House) The Death of Peter Pan (New Theatre Sydney) In Praise of Love (Apollo)
Wizards of Oz
Sheridan Morley
Originally entitled What If?, and largely unrevived in the half-century since it was first written and briefly staged, Noel Cow- ard's Peace In Our Time remains one of his most intriguing if uncharacteristic dramas. Now revived by The Touring Partnership (Cardiff, Norwich, Bath, Newcastle, during April) it offers a cast of 30 in a wartime London which, we discover early in the first scene, is under Nazi occupation. Noel had spent time in Paris in 1939 and again in 1945 and was intrigued by the varying behaviour of his friends there: 'worse things than bombardment,' he wrote in his diary, 'can happen to a city in wartime,' and the thing he had in mind was of course col- laboration. He saw Chevalier, Guitry, Chanel accused with varying degrees of jus- tification, and began to wonder how Lon- doners would have reacted to invasion.
Peace In Our Time is raw, angry and thrilling: the clenched cigarette holders are still there, and the acid wit, and the fervent belief in the patriotism of the middle classes under pressure. But there's also a sense of action adventure which you will elsewhere only find in his film In Which We Serve and maybe Cavalcade: the idea of a nation at breaking point, summoning up resources it never knew it had and almost let slip until too late. Churchill shot, the royal family under guard and Hitler driv- ing up the Mall had all been real possibili- ties only a couple of years before this play was written, and what could now be no more than a period curiosity is given life by Coward's curious mastery of crowd scenes and sudden, searing insights into old-established London patterns of sur- vival and success against the odds. His characters here are all kicking against the pricks, be they Nazis or merely treacheou socialist leader-writers. Wyn Jones's epic production urgently deserves a central London showing.
A week in Australia is hardly time enough to take its theatrical temperature, but three very different shows at least sug- gest the sheer variety of what's on offer there. Where else in the world, right now, could you sit in an open-air car park watch- ing old bangers turned into blazing infer- nos as a company from the Northern Rivers of New South Wales solemnly act out Peter Weir's old movie The Cars That Ate Paris? True, only the barest outlines of the Gothic-horror plot survive, but as feral outback dancers writhe across yet another flaming automobilie, to the accompani- ment of fireworks and a full-rock score, you have to admit that you've come a long way from.Shaftesbury Avenue.
The Cars were for me the spectacle-high- light of this year's Perth Festival: but in the more contentional proscenium arch of the Sydney Opera House's theatre, Australia's most prolific and successful dramatist David Williamson has a new play which goes into headlong battle with the prevail- ing critical orthodoxy of the country's uni- versities and arts pages. Dead White Males is an outraged attack on political correct- ness which brings Shakespeare back to earth to defend himself against a corrupt university lecturer, and although it only intermittently works as either drama or black comedy its power lies in the thought that Australia has merely exchanged the cultural cringe towards Europe for genu- flection towards the worst of American col- lege campus new-speak.
But the best play I saw was also the most surprising to have come from down under: at the New Theatre in Sydney, Barry Lowe's The Death of Peter Pan is a haunt- ing account of J.M. Barrie and the lost boys of the Llewellyn-Davies family whom he adopted, specifically his favourite Michael, the one who was drowned in a gay suicide pact at Oxford in 1921. This is a Peter Pan we must have over here soon. Returning to Shaftesbury Avenue, In Praise of Love (Apollo) will do little to keep the Rattigan revival bandwagon on the rails. Originally seen in 1973 as a one- acter called After Lydia, it was then unwise- ly expanded to full length at the demand of Rex Harrison who is also in a way its central character, since the play concerns his relationship with Kay Kendall — when both of them knew she was dying of leukaemia but entered an unspoken, infinitely English, conspiracy of tight lips to keep the news from one another. As usual Rattigan is here writing about the 'English disease' of emotional suppression and understatement, but with none of the power of Deep Blue Sea or Separate Tables. Peter Bowles and Lisa Harrow are ade- quate in an otherwise inadequate staging.
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