THEATRE
Good conduct
HILARY SPURLING
Conduct Unbecoming (Queens) Hamlet (Open Space, Tottenham Court Road) The Merchant of Venice (Regent's Park) The Country Wife (Chichester) Barry England's Conduct Unbecoming is a rum do. Set in an Indian Army officers' mess towards the end of the last century, written with a stilted formality reminiscent of Galsworthy, and dealing in those ele- ments of melodrama, mystery and romance —officers with drawn swords playing arcane regimental games, or waltzing in scarlet and gold by moonlight, the ball disrupted at its height by a distraught lady, weeping for a deed without a name performed in the pitch dark folly, the whole culminating in a tense and protracted midnight trial— which have been so long and rigorously excluded from the contemporary stage, the play, in short, is a rare treat.
It is terse, compact and admirably plotted. It has the energy, though not perhaps the gaiety, of Boucicault, the exotic brio of The New Arabian Nights, and—in Paul Jones's dim young subaltern to whom it falls to unravel this tissue of shame, dis- honour and depravity in the regiment's murky past—a hero who bears comparison with Stevenson's phlegmatic and strangely reckless narrators. It is, moreover, perfectly free from the censorious sentimentality and the inane manipulation of character which have made the well-made play an object of such dread.
Like all the best melodramatists, Mr England is both adroit and enigmatic. It is never entirely clear, for instance, what pre- cisely happened when Lieutenant Truly mis- behaved himself in a manner so abomin- able, and so fearfully punished, that it is still referred to in the mess only in whis- pers; and, though we are given a graphic account of Captain Scarlet's grisly end (flayed alive by native soldiers in the mut- My), the sources of the captain's sinister, indeed fatal, influence on his living brothers remain obscure. Or take the general's son (Jeremy Clyde) who drinks like a fish and whom—with his languid manners, his por- celain pallor, his tastes for flogging and French opera—one can well imagine walk- ing down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in his mediaeval hand. We are never told why Lieutenant Millington considers his august father a swine, nor for that matter why he is at such pains to get himself thrown out of the regiment—both of which I take to be a sign of excellent discretion in the playwright. For one thing, the reasons why precocious young men despise their fathers are seldom simple (which is why the clear-cut explanations favoured by informative authors seem generally so banal); for another, it is quite sufficient that Millington should flout his superiors, mock his contemporaries and admire wog songs, for him to generate that atmosphere of contempt and loathing which is one of the chief pleasures of this play.
One will not soon forget the adjutant's expression—a cold and brutal sneer on features as plump, smooth and pink as a tearose—at Millington's first gaffe; nor the colonel's perplexity, accustomed as he is to the assiduous—half-flirtatious, half-obsequi- ous—attentions of his staff; nor the resent- ment on the flushed, slack and jeering faces of Millington's fellow subalterns. Donald Pickering's adjutant is a brilliant perform- among others too numerous to name; Vai May's production is admirably sharp and clean. And it is curious to note that, when it comes to the crunch, Mr England's officers behave to a man under stress with exemplary honesty and courage. Which, considering the current line on military morals, I take to be another mark of singu- lar boldness on the playwright's part. . Meanwhile Charles Marowitz's Hamlet, on view again at the Open Space, is one of the gayest and most entrancing things on any London stage. Smoother and more elabor- ate than his collage of Macbeth, this Hamlet is at its best when it takes the text most literally for what it is—perhaps the densest compilation of cliches in the language, a play whose every other line, let alone gesture, traditional business or conjectural subtext, is by now so hackneyed as to seem, without prodigious efforts by actors or director, largely meaningless. Mr Maro- witz's version, by exploiting rather than ignoring the accretions of four hundred years, most elegantly sidesteps this dilemma. Watch his clown, for instance, crossly prompting Hamlet ('Speak the speech, I pray you . . . trippingly') through a par- ticularly trying soliloquy, or adjudicating in the duel, fought with words, between our hero and Laertes: a duel which Laertes wins hands down against Hamlet's feeble attempts to parry him with insipid tags.
This harassed and dejected prince is cruelly exposed to the gaze of an implacably observant court. Their eyes are everywhere, watching him, sneering from a gilded paper play-box or booing, in a ferocious final trial scene, Hamlet's pitiful defence—when, as the court closes in, he intones in despera- tion an assortment of his own most famous first lines. Nikolas Simmonds's Hamlet, Edward Phillips's clown, and Natasha Pyne's perverse and simpering Ophelia are particularly fine; and anyone who still doubts that Shakespeare has become (in Mr Marowitz's words) 'like a well-worn violin concerto or an opera, a test for virtuosity,' would be well advised to make at once for Regent's Park, where Richard Digby Day's The Merchant of Venice miserably fails the test. This is a sorry affair, with most of the cast apparently cross-eyed with bore- dom or perhaps incomprehension; its com- pensations are few but sweet, in the shape of Alison Fiske's Jessica, Ronnie Stevens's Gobbo and Richard Goolden as his father —wizened, sand-blind and looking, in his wrinkled red coat, like an ancient cherry teetering on two spindly sticks.
The Country Wife is also disappointing, in a sadly ragged production by Robert Chetwyn, but contains an immaculate per- formance by Maggie Smith—as debonair as ever and as exquisitely humorous—for which one would travel ten times as far as Chichester and back.
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