Proper shocker
TELEVISION STUART HOOD
A great deal of the television drama we see on our screens consists of work which can claim to be called 'drama' only because the characters act out their parts. Television plays tend to be narrative pieces in which what the characters say is less important than the story-line—than what they do or what happens to them. It is rare to come across a piece written for television in which one must listen intently because to miss an exchange or even a single line is to miss an essential moment in the development of a dramatic situation conveyed through dialogue. Last week in his Let's Murder Vivaldi David Mercer gave us one of these rare exceptions, for this was a play in which the tension was built up brilliantly, wittily and cruelly, in the course of exchanges between four characters—a boy and a girl shacked up in a one-roomed flat; a husband and wife, long and unfaithfully married, living graciously in St John's Wood. It was a true comedy of manners of Life and Times in NW1—admittedly a heightened ver- sion of what I can observe across the way but entirely plausible and based on human realities.
The danger of the comedy of manners on television is that the element of artificiality in the dialogue—the heightened quality it must display—runs counter to the realism imposed by the television camera. It was one of the virtues of Let's Murder Vivaldi that the director, Alan Bridges, had worked on it with great style. One of his main sets was a 'practical' Sunday supplement kitchen in which the married couple were busy preparing a Sunday supplement supper for two. Their movements as they went from refrigerator to electric mixer, from the wine bin to the herb cabinet, were like the steps of an intricate and formal dance into which Denholm Elliott and Gwen Watford could fit with splendid timing and great polish the bitcheries, the calculated franknesses that Concealed deeper falsehoods, the laughing sallies that cloaked the couple's hatred for each other.
If the scenes between the boy and the girl were less successful it was because David Sumner as the helpless, dependent young man who alternates between self-pity and violence, found himself called upon to play a recurring Mercer character which is, I am beginning to think, fundamentally unactable. The girl, played by Glenda Jackson, was given and took her big chance in a set piece with the husband who, with his wife's knowledge and consent, has taken her to a hotel in the country. Here Mercer and his director created high comedy out of the constraints and embarrassments of a sexual encounter. The set was once more 'practical'- hand-basins, loos, showers, all appeared to function and most of them were used. In the course of this unconsummated evening the girl stripped to a passion-killing bathing suit and in the process stripped him naked as a human being. Returning home he faced, over the breakfast table, a wife prepared to deliver the emotional coup de grace by revealing the extent of her own fidelities. That he should stab her with the bread-knife was dramatic but not unexpected. The violence of hate is different in kind from the violence that springs from love and need.
This is a play which one commercial company turned down. I believe that to get it past the watchdogs of the rra would have been a major struggle. Even the Bac had considerable cold feet about it. The play was in and out of the schedule a couple of times. It suffered a handful of cuts: a reference to the menopause, the phrase 'Jesus wept,' a mention of cobblers and the verb `to pee.' The rest of the dialogue was extremely free and entirely consonant with the social milieu portrayed. It was justifiably and properly shocking. I cannot help feeling that, having had the courage to put on a thoroughly good play which was not calculated to corrupt anyone, the Corporation need not have strained at the odd gnat.
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