Mil I &TAM
-v-
THEATRE
Knightsbridge Wonder
By HILARY SPURLING
OUR current adulation of 'pop culture' is a prime device for keeping ahead of the Joneses—and not basically different from any
other kind of intellectual snobbery. At worst it is a form of mental cowardice, a means of reject- ing anything which requires individual effort, any- -thing which asks that the beholder come halfway to meet it, anything not painlessly disposable. And
it is not the only sign of hypocrisy and self-
deception. Only last week Brigid Brophy detected a rising plot to force our women back to their
ancient condition of illiterate semi-slavery : 'now the hungry belly—or the volcano—is rumbling again' wrote Miss Brophy a propos Sir John Newsom and two articles in the Observer called `The Sex War'—`and I begin to fear it means to consume the female sex.'
And, also last week, we were given a play- a hole-and-corner affair quickly stowed away after two matinees in Knightsbridge—which brilliantly put its finger on this contemporary malaise. It deals with a single mother-dominated family of arty intellectuals: two daughters, one of whom has retreated from life behind horn- rimmed spectacles and takes a high moral line when her sister opts for marriage and raising a family; a nervy spinster aunt pursuing whatever cultural fads are currently going the rounds; a husband and fiancé who subscribe more or less to the view which Miss Brophy attacks, that a woman's place is at the sink, and she ought at least to make a decent pretence of being ignorant. Both men are ineffectual and no wonder consider- ing what they are up against : the mother who rides rough-shod over the family is one of those formidable donnish women, aggressively mascu- line and full of half-baked pretensions which no one has ever had the strength or courage to expose. At present she has a pseudo-poet in tow and subjects the rest of the household to earnest sessions over the tape-recorder while he plays back his verses.
The play is Moliere's Les Femmes savantes presented in modern dress at the Institut Francais by the Comedie de l'Ouest (founded in 1949, based in Rennes). If I were Mr Peter Daubeny I should be grinding my teeth at having let this production slip through my fingers. M. Guy Parigot is evidently an accomplished director. His programme insists on the need to rescue Moliere from the dead hand of tradition, and is headed with a quotation from Louis Jouvet: 'LE THEATRE est PROVOCATION'—though I daresay it's considerably more provoking to a Frenchman than to an Englishman, who, coming fresh to Moliere, with few prejudices, has no corns to be trodden on.
The modern setting has decided advantages: in the first place it is a relief, in a play which leans heavily on social nuances, not to be confronted with the usual outlandish array...of red heels, powdered wigs, beauty patches, knobbed canes which make it so hard to gauge what precisely constitutes affectation. Here Trissotin's silk suit, not loud but faintly shimmer- ing, places him instantly as a discreetly ambitious opportunist. Second, the ebullient farce style unexpectedly flourishes against a twentieth-cen- tury background : whisky flows like water from Chrysale's cocktail cabinet, the characters are almost continually 'high,' we teeter perpetually over the abyss and only just skirt it at the end. Lastly the necessary element of exaggeration, far from being toned down, produces a rich rogues' gallery of contemporary types. Denise Bonal as Belise, the coy maiden aunt, convinced that she is infinitely desirable, infinitely desired, inviolate only by virtue of her dedication to higher things, skitters in and out in an eccentric garment trimmed with ostrich feathers over skin-tight ski pants, a lady often to be met with in left-wing bookshops. Roger Guillo as Vadius, the hypo- critical pedant, own brother to Tartuffe, turns up in roll-necked sweater and jeans, a mountainous, shambling, short-sighted, pot-bellied academic, pawing with eager inexperienced lechery at the ladies' thighs in his brief moment of glory in the drawing-room. Best of all, in a cast which has no weak links, is Philaminte herself, played by Jeannette Granval as a grotesque and terrifying matriarch whose revenge on society has brought little ease to herself and none to her family. She wears slacks and a kind of fringed horse-blanket, a Gauloise droops from her lips, bare feet bulge through gold sandals which are deliberately and offensively feminine. The household wilts under her baleful indolent gaze. Men are admitted strictly on her own terms : her husband, protesta- Lions dying on his lips, is relegated to the role of ignominious breadwinner; Trissotin is tolerated, even flattered for the gratification he brings. The mutual attitude of these two egotists is a tacit 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.' And the scene in which he plays back his shoddy little poem to the ecstatic ladies is a tour-de-force —the final triumph of self-deception, an abdica- tion of the mind so complete that both he and she are transported in almost sensual abandonment. This play has no moral for the hypocrites beyond the Satanic 'This is Hell, nor am I out of it.'
And so to the Italians at the Aldwych, where the Compagnia dei Giovani opened on Monday in Pirandello's comedy, The Rules of the Game. From the moment the curtain rose on Pier Luigi Pizzi's spare, glittering, black set, empty save for the miraculous Rossela Falk disposed motionless on a day-bed, and the shadow of Carlo Guiffre falling on a panel of coloured tiles at the back, lit up like one of Bonnard's glowing bathroom walls, we knew that this was something as rich, as strange to us, and as perfect as the Moscow Arts in Chekhov or the Berliner Ensemble in Brecht. Three characters—wife, lover, husband— play a game in which every move—and by move I mean the shifting of weight from one foot to the other, a dilation of the pupils, the merest clearing of the throat—counts for all. The husband, who has schooled himself most per- fectly in the rules of the game—to want nothing, take nothing, above all to show .nothing—finally encompasses the death and destruction of the other two. Romolo Valli's triumph is accom- plished without haste, without mess, without rais- ing his voice, and yet suggests depths of passion barely conceivable, like that exquisite murder which leaves only the .trace of a thin red hair across the victim's throat. This is a Theatre of Cruelty beside which our own Bonds and Brookes look like very jolly scouts.
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