Kenneth Hurren on a court without heirs or graces
The Bewitched by Peter Barnes; Royal Shakespeare Company (Aldwych, in repertory) That Championship Season by Jason Miller; with Broderick Crawford (Garrick) Table Manners by Alan Ayckbourn; with Tom Courtenay (Greenwich) Who Saw Him Die? by Tudor Gates; with Stratford Johns (Theatre Royal, Haymarket)
I shall have to beg your indulgence somewhat as regards The Bewitched, which has to do with the dispiriting afflictions and unappetising personality of Charles II (or Carlos II) of Spain.
attended the piece — if I may employ a jocularity which, by its very antiquity, should commend itself to such a specialist in old and stolen jokes as Barnes — I attended the piece, as I was saying, in singularly unfortunate circumstances: the curtain was up.
That is to say, I attended it until the interval afforded the opportunity of polite escape, displaying up to that point (a matter of near enough two tormented hours) what seems in retrospect a quite remarkable forbearance towards what might be most charitably described as a monumental and tasteless bore. I have no reason to suppose that it improved sensa
tionally after the interval — the clear portents were, indeed, that it was going to go on in exactly the same way — but of course, I am bound to record my strategic, defensive retreat, and to say, too, that so far from retaining a vivid and detailed memory of its first act for the purposes of this report, I have been doing my best to banish its offensive clutter from my mind.
Nevertheless, my recollection is that Barnes's springboard into the treacherous waters of baroque fantasy and comic anachronism that ultimately engulf him is the quite reasonable thought that there are grievous snags in the hereditary system as applied to thrones, or, come to that, any seats of authority. It is a measure of the woolliness of his approach that a view, which, on the face of it, is obvious and incontrovertible comes to look almost outrageous. This is partly due to the hostile suspicion that inevitably greets any general conclusion drawn from a specific case, especially one so bizarre as that of the hapless Carlos, who has neither heirs nor graces. A victim of Hapsburgian inbreeding, he is portrayed as being not only infertile, but suffering from impotence, incontinence, epilepsy, suppurating ulcers, diarrhoea, rickets, lice, dermatitis, the 'Hapsburg jaw' and, I daresay, dandruff. It isn't often that an actor's performance can be described as 'spastic' in any complimentary sense, but Alan Howard, who is burdened with the role here, may well appreciate it.
A further disadvantageous circumstance is that it is hard not to be aware in this particular connection that the breakdown of the hereditary system, because of Carlos's failure to produce an heir, resulted in a twelve-year war to decide the succession — and even the pitiful Carlos, it might be argued, was better than that. The nobles and clerics around him evidently thought so, anyway, for despite his palpable shortcomings as breeding stock, they are anxious to the point of desperation that he should copulate and procreate. Their endeavours suitably to stimulate him (culminating in the alleged eroticism of the auto-da-fC) are, I'm afraid, the constant and revolting preoccupation of Barnes, whose fervour for historical scholarship is less evident than his relish for ribaldry
and scatology.
He is keenly abetted by the director, Terry Hands, who lets pass no opportunity for a touch of unseemly titillation (anything from urination to flagellation, whatever turns you on) and is al ways ready to fit the mood of the moment by populating the stage with a conclave of grotesques from some Hogarthian nightmare, perhaps scrabbling on all fours among the soiled royal bed linen and underwear, sniffing for significant traces of menstrual and seminal odours. How different, how very different, from the home life . . .
When I left, the hitherto dismayingly limp Carlos had just become symbolically possessed of a gargantuan gilded phallus with which to assault his happy, if surprised, consort. This development seemed at odds with the general drift of the piece but, as noted, I did not hang about to hear the explanation. The chances are they picked the thing up secondhand and cheap from the National Theatre where it last saw service as a sort of maypole in Peter Brook's production of Seneca's Oedipus.
I went the distance, I'm glad to say, with That Championship Season. This is an American play by Jason Miller which scooped all the 'best play' awards that were going in New York in 1972, but struck me as a no more than ordinarily competent re-working of the contemporary Broadway 'success' formula, whereby a bunch of standard-model middle-class Americans, on the brink of the climacteric, are gathered boozily together for some sort of personality-stripping truth game (q.v. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Boys in the Band etc). In this variation, we're at the reunion of the members of a championship high school basketball team, now pushing forty, and the leathery old coach under whose driving, in their youth, they "gave this defeated town something to be proud of." They forgather as proudly and convivially as always but this, of course, is the night of their disillusion about themselves and each other, and when after all these years — during which, inexplicably, the subject somehow hasn't come up — they will even face the shameful truth about the game that won them the championship. Broderick Crawford (as the coach) and a forceful allAmerican cast make an arresting affair of it, and there are some good, tough, funny lines.
There are funny lines of a gentler sort in Table Manners, the opening shot in an Alan Ayckbourn trilogy that might well prove to be the most successfully ingenious piece of sustained comic playwriting for years. I'll keep you informed.
In the case of Who Saw Him Die?, a wearyingly implausible thriller, reviewers are urged not to spoil the enjoyment of future audiences by disclosing the plot. It is an admonition that betrays a spectacular optimism in the matters both of the future audiences and of their enjoyment.
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