Theatre
Sophistication
By ALAN BRIEN The Pleasure of His Company.
(Haymarket.) — Gilt and Gingerbread. (Duke of York's.)—How Say You?
(Aldwych.) — The Dutch Courtesan. (Stratford, East.) MISS CORAL BROWNE is as plain as the nose on her face—which means she is very attractive indeed. It is quite a conk, a real queenly pyramid which dominates the white desert of her face for twenty miles in every direction. A day's gallop east or west from that noble viaduct linking the flared trumpet nostrils with the marble plateau of her forehead are two banana-shaped pools which might be eyes. They are always slightly out of synchronisation —one auspicious and one drooping, with mirth in funeral and dirge in marriage, in equal scale weighing delight and dole. And south, a long way south near the end of the world where the Easter Island chin builds its alabaster barricade against dragons, is the warm, wet, crimson oasis of her mouth. Miss Browne, in short, is the figurehead on a Phoenician quinquereme.,I had world enough and time to voyage this ageless map during the performance of The Pleasure of His Company mainly because of the dullness of the surround- ing countryside. Not only is Miss Browne worth photographing, she is also worth recording. She sounds the way Hermione Gingold still sounds, just as she looks the way Miss Gingold hopes she used to look. The play is written by Samuel Taylor 'with Cornelia Otis Skinner,' and I suspect that Miss Browne's lines are those Miss Skinner personally inlaid for herself before she agreed to accept the role. Coral Browne is a retired champion from the International Set, Game and Match who has exiled herself in farthest San Francisco. In a drawing-room which Tony Walton has designed to resemble a corner of the Sistine Chapel rebuilt for a tinned-beef king, she queen-mothers it over a dimly solid second hus- band and a brightly ethereal only daughter. When her charming playboy first husband suddenly turns up for the child's marriage, this statuesque matron reluctantly, and only half-consciously, begins to warm into life again. Miss Browne has the only lines in the play which operate on two levels of dramatic intention. She says both what such a woman would be able to say and what she would not be able not to say. Sitting uneasily on the sofa after steaming open a cable to her ex- husband while he silently and reproachfully strips the gum off his fingertips, she suddenly bursts out, 'Nothing ever dries in this weather.' And this simple, straightforward line brilliantly, inevitably, brings down the house. I would have been happy to remain like Samson destroyed among the ruins —for the writing and playing of the rest of the cast's dialogue never equals hers.
The Pleasure of His Company aims to be a sophisticated comedy. But it succeeds only if the adjective is used in its original meaning. The theme is sophisticated with whimsy and charm and knowingness the way champagne would be sophisticated with soda water or sugar with sand. Mr. Taylor is trying to be everything to every- body like a dime-a-dance hostess—and it serves him 'right if he makes plenty of good money but few good friends. The theme, after all, is the am- biguous attraction exercised by the middle-aged father on his teenage• daughter when they rub against each other for the first time. It could be played for bitter comedy or hilarious tragedy. But instead we have a sickly woman's-mag intimacy where grandfather greets his grand- daughter with the phrase 'Hello, person.' We have a Reader's Digest wisdom embodied in epigrams like 'Morality is simply low blood pressure.' And we have a narrative line which wiggles backwards and forwards, watering each viewpoint in turn, but never winding home to the sea. Mr. Taylor rarely knows any more about his characters than the audience does and so cannot ever spring on us a convincingly unexpected sur- prise. Apart from Miss Browne, no one exists when off-stage. Nigel Patrick, who also directs, is too much the perky gossip-column con-man for the fabulous 'Pogo' Poole. Barry Jones, as the cracker-motto grandfather, seems to have no work to do in the plot and looks as much like a hard-bitten ex-newspaperman as Godfrey Winn. I have admired Judith Stott before in • these columns. But her forte is in playing those pale, bright, unfinished nymphets who look like butterflies and still think like caterpillars. Here we are told too much about her irresistible attrac- tion and are shown only her kittenish cuteness. The Pleasure of His Company is passable enter- tainment as an hors d'oeuvre or a dessert. But only Coral Browne provides the beginnings of a meal. Nevertheless, this American import has that kind of professional confidence which is lacking in the writing of the British comedy Gilt and Gingerbread. This comfortable giggle about half- hearted adultery and prosperous bankruptcy in the stockbrokers' belt of Regents Park looks and sounds like a reject from the Aldwych of the Thirties. It might have worked if its author, Lionel Hale, had possessed lungs strong enough and hands steady enough to blow it all up like a frivo- lous, fragile glass ornament which could hang alone in any period room, useless, timeless, and elegant. Instead, he seems curiously apologetic and defensive, like a man who has gone into retreat to perfect a rocket ship and discovers too late that he has invented the wheelbarrow. Nobody suc- ceeds in achieving anything in Mr. Hale's world except by accident—staged by the Moscow Arts Theatre it would be thought a gross caricature of decadent capitalism even by the critic of Pravda. Kay Hammond, Hugh Sinclair and John Clements are the players chiefly involved.
How Say You? is a barrack-room farce trans- ferred joke by joke to the law courts. Directed with unpretentious gusto by John Counsell, it should entertain those who look back with nostal- gia to the B features of Will Hay, George Formby and the Crazy Gang. Leslie Dwyer, Kathleen Harrison and A. E. Matthews give very good imitations of their film selves. Francis Matthews, who plays the Lucky Jim barrister hero, is an engaging romantic comedian who has some of the nimble charm of a young Cary Grant.
The Dutch Courtesan is the sort of angry young malcontent's romp which would have been pre- sented on Sunday nights at the Royal Court of 1605. Today John Marston would be a gift to Paul Slickey—at the age of twenty-four his verses were burnt by the Archbishop of Canterbury, at twenty- five he insulted Ben Jonson and had his ears boxed in public, at thirty he collaborated with Jonson and was sent to gaol for a play which offended the Scots. The Dutch Courtesan shows the Jacobean Chelsea set gulling the middle classes, making fools of the poor whores, and playing elaborate practi- cal jokes on old college chums at the foot of the gallows. Marston's women are much more indi- vidual than his men, but Joan Littlewood has allowed her merry crew to make too much noise and too little sense.
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