Theatre
Deviating Into Sense
By ALAN BRIEN
One Way Pendulum. (Royal Court.) — Merry Wives of Windsor. (Old Vic.)—Alice in Wonderland. (Winter Gar- den.)—Noddy in Toyland. (Prince's.) — Aladdin. (Coli- seum.) IN the theatre, hangovers linger longer than in any other art. It is a generation since the British audiences gorged their minds full in the dark—since GBS stuffed old turkeys with his hot roasted chestnuts, Wilde decanted new wine into cobwebbed bottles. (Wilde's seriousness of purpose behind the make-up is still underrated—there is hardly one controversial topic, from class-consciousness to adultery, from the Labour theory of value to the Tory practice of profiteering, which is not touched upon in The Importance of Being Earnest.) Now, at last, there is house-room for some intellectual pick-me-ups mixed by Behan, Pinter and N. F. Simpson. They have patented a new dramatic sal volatile in the form of the tragic farce. In their plays the custard pies are always poisoned. The water pistols are filled from the vitriol bottles. The leg-pulling is carried out on the rack.
I have listed them in descending order of evplicitness—though all of them, in Shakespeare'.; metaphor from. howls, 'by indirections find direc- tions out.' Brendan Behan is most openly con- cerned about the way we destroy ourselves in private by oppressing our fellows in public. His messages are succinct, despite the clowning of the brogue's gallery boyos who deliver them. His epigrams are simply telegrams read out in an Irish accent. The references to Cyprus, Suez. the Daily Express, Macmillan and Dulles are set up :n capitals. (Almost all the new playwrights fill their dialogue with brand names, proper names, im- proper names. Scholars will be given doctorates in the year 2000 for theses called 'Some Sugges- tions Towards the Answer to John Osborne's Question in T.W.P.S.—"Who is John Deane Potter?" ') Within the wild whirling walls of any scene, each of Behan's paragraphs makes indi- vidual sense on its .own. With Harold Pinter, the unit has shrunk to the sentence. The sentences rattle and spark like crossed swords, but the duellists are fighting back to back and blind-
folded.
The Birthday. Party had a riveting first act. It was Hitchcock gone mad staging the apocalypse in a boarding-house kitchen where the slug-ugly lodger, the feeble-minded landlady and her mum- mified husband were arraigned before an Inquisi- tion set up by a vampire Jew and a zombie Irishman. But when the moment came to put the unspeakable into words, Pinter refused the fence and galloped off in all directions at once. N. F. Simpson's prose hardly ever deviates into sense. It is a palimpsest of non-sequiturs, a double acrostic of crossword clues. It is also true farce in that it aims to provoke laughter by deceiving us into admitting impossible connections between improbable opposites. But with Simpson, the 4Posites are ideas as well as persons. He pro-
yokes the head-laugh as well as the belly-laugh. His jokes are brain-splitting as well as side- splitting. Once we have made the electric connec- tion between the two poles of his irony, we can no longer refuse to believe in the reality of the cir- cuit. It is the Swiftian conjuring trick performed in the manner of Feydcau.
At least, that was my understanding of Mr. Simpson's aims and methods in his two earlier one-act plays. Of these, A Resounding Tinkle seemed to hit the target with a resounding wham —the tea-cosy couple in the suburban villa they have never even looked at CI thought we lived in a bungalow'), with men at the door asking the husband to form a government (*That's the Prime Minister's job. Anyway, we don't know anybody'), mis-served by shops which send them an elephant instead of the snake they ordered, forced to be an audience for uninvited comedians, with their living-room commandeered by The Critics who patronise the play in which they are compelled to act by the Great Producer out there. This was recognisably, and hilariously, and de- pressingly, the world lived in by the white- collared neighbours of Arnold Wesker's farm workers in Roots. Mr. Simpson, like Mr. Wesker Mr. Behan, and perhaps Mr. Pinter too, was giving us the text for today—`Stop being manipulated.'
In One Way Pendulum. N. F. Simpson seems at first to be juggling with the same comical hand- grenades. But too few of them are primed. The homicidal, skeletal son training the I-Speak-Your- Weight machines to sing the Hallelujah chorus; the glum mechanical father carting home sections of a Build-Your-Own-Old-Bailey kit; the gaga aunt in the wheel-chair endlessly planning journeys through space from a celestial Brad- shaw; the pneumatic teenage daughter worrying about the simian length of her arms (I've riothing against apes—as such'); the bulging charwoman who is hired, not to clean up but to eat up (Tm 'Well, you haven't got much done in forty minutes.' afraid I haven't touched the gherkins yet'); the matter-of-fact mum who has a comfortable explanation for every incongruity (Ile had the cash register just as something to offer in part exchange in case he wanted a typewriter,: these have the old familiar tinkle. While no combina- tion of words picked by the human mind is pre- sumably ever meaningless, Mr. Simpson's com- binations here can only unlock the secrets of his own mind—they have little to reveal to us about ourselves. The zaniness is self-consciously, pre- tentiously worked up for the sake of deliberate disassociation. 'Only disconnect' is now the motto. That way defeatism lies—and the fashion- able unpoetry of the beatniks, the modish no- plays of lonesco, the eventual betrayal of meaning.
It is only fair to Mr. Simpson to say that the second half of One Way Pendulum is a partial return to his earlier style and aims. The Old Bailey has been erected in the drawing-room and the trial of the mass-murderer son begins in his absence. The pedantic barbarity and pettifogging ruthlessness of the law in action is shrewdly and acidly caricatured. The grisly farce of courtroom antics has always appealed to the sense of humour of British intellectuals—ever since Shakespeare convulsed the Elizabethan smart set by the hilarious twist of making Shylock condemned to life-long Christianity. N. F. Simpson brings the satire up to date with the Mr. Tinklebury Snap- driver and the Mr. Honeyweather Gooseboote of 1959. Douglas Wilmer's suavely, sinisterly, god- like Judge who points out that he has gravely dis- arranged his personal appointments to be present; Graham Crowden's prosecuting counsel with his negligently fashionable drawl as he throws doubt on a witness's claim to have been in Birmingham by proving that, though ignorant of geography, the witness knowingly absented himself from a long list of towns which only an expert would have heard of; and George Benson's eccentric working man who regards the oath 'as something of a challenge' and will only swear by Harriet Beecher Stowe on a copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin provide a succession of extremely funny moments. But as a whole, One Way Pendulum is not a whole. Mr. Simpson is dangerously near being caught in the most dangerous trap for any comic writer—that of being funny about funny subjects. This is exactly what happened to Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor. It is his only middle-class play, and the only one written entirely in prose. All the popular minor charac- ters of Henry IV are here boiled down and re- hashed to make a commercial hit. And a hit it still is--I have rarely seen an audience so genuinely and continually amused at Shake- spearian jokes. The Merry Wives is an early Whitehall farce and as such very enjoyable. Joss Ackland, one of the few of the present Old Vic company with the beginnings of a classic style, makes Falstaff a monstrous amalgam of Sidney Greenstreet and Charles Laughton. Maggie Smith and Moyra Fraser are a squeaky, giggly pair of lifesize dolls as the wives, and the director, John Hale, has had the ingenious and effective idea of turning their gulling scenes into comic parodies of that pre-Shakespeare rhetorical style of acting denounced by Hamlet to the players.
Whether Alice in Wonderland is material for a musical sub-pantomime I rather doubt. I have a feeling that it is more read by Times leader- writers than by modern children aid that too many jokes demand a sophisticated, not to say scholarly, appreciation of Victorian literature. There is little doubt, however, that the Winter Garden presentation would ruin anything. It is coarsely directed, obviously scored, vulgarly dressed, absent-mindedly lit and arthritically scene-shifted. In the heart of this comic-strip edi- tion of Alice, Frankie Howerd, a brilliant comedian with the sad battered face of a deflat- ing rugby ball, can be seen itching to abandon his lines and make us laugh our heads off.
Noddy in Toyland is not intended for me and the three children I smuggled in seemed to enjoy 'every moment. But can no one convince Miss Enid Blyton that in this day and age, before audiences which include coloured children, it is displaying the-crassest insensitivity to portray the golliwogs as idiot victims of toyland apartheid with the parallel made quite explicit by a nasty song and dance by three of them called 'I'm Golly. I'm Woggy. I'm Nigger'? To Altf ddin I took no children—and I doubt whether even healthy adults ought to be asked to sit through an hour and forty minutes of one 'act of anything. Especially a pantomime with not a single funny joke, or slapstick interlude, but instead intermin- able changes of ghastly, glittery, gargantuan scenery made apparently from plasticine and broken glass, while hundreds of dancers cross and re-cross and re-re-cross the stage on one leg with the right index finger pointing to the roOf.
Previous page
