God Bless (Aldwych)
THEATRE
Striptease
HILARY SPURLING
Spitting Image (Duke of York's) La Fastidiosa (urc at the Mercury)
The burden of Jules Feiffer's new play is the pained, familiar message of his strip-cartoons: that America is run by fiends and madmen whose prey—emotional cripples to a man—are a band of dim, cheerless and absurdly puny liberal intellectuals. The point is made in the programme, rather more pungently than on the stage, by a formidable old gentleman wearing a starred and stripy hat who confesses, with a skinny smile, that his life is ruled by a barbaric,
secret bloodlust. But it is those loopy, straggling pen strokes—the piecrust eyebrows, the raggy hair, the vicious button eye—which carry con- viction, and with it a certain placid sense of vengeance. The text alone, as in God Bless, is singularly unpersuasive without that cranky line.
For one thing, the bullies, whose odious features are so lovingly particularised in the drawings, have been replaced in God Bless by forces of vague, nameless, and so much less dis- turbing, villainy. America in the 'seventies is waging tri-continental war and gripped at home by, mayhem on a scale undreamt of in the modest 'sixties. Meanwhile, our hero doggedly dictates his memoirs which, since he was politi- cally active at the age of nine and is still going strong in his 11 1 th year, prove to be a potted history of the States. It emerges that public life, from Cleveland to Johnson and beyond, in- volves at best a measure of hypocrisy, at worst is riddled with corruption.
This fairly unexceptionable discovery seems to have come as a shock to Mr Feiffer, and the tone of his play—a tirade of shrill, monotonous and aggrieved complaint—will come as something of a shock to his admirers. Gone are those ungainly, masterful, progressive ladies along with their stringy, chinless spouses. Gone are those fiends in human form, whose rasping voices one could almost hear rising faintly off the page, and gone their draggled, plaintive and woefully ineffectual political opponents. It is as though Mr Feiffer were sud-
denly imprisoned in his own strip. Instead of watching his characters and recording their antics with mild amusement, he has joined them, so to speak, so that we sample at first hand their prowess as unmitigated bores. Freed from that restraining line, no longer seen through that detached. observant eye. Mr Feiffer's pallid creatures speak with one voice, in a kind of dull buzz of peevishness and spite, above all of impenetrable smugness– for there is some- thing depressingly parochial about this play.
The general effect is of a rather dismal con- cert party in which even the jokes—anti-Jew, anti-negro, anti-pcacenik—pall with repetition; these sly digs are flattering no doubt to the locals—to an audience daringly jeering its own fondest pretensions—but desperately tedious to anyone from outside the parish. The production by Geoffrey Reeves is sadly clumsy and the acting for the most part undistin- guished; Roy Dotrice, as our antique hero, has an engaging habit of falling asleep between one word and the next, and connoisseurs may like to know that Barry Stanton makes an entrance (last line of Act I) in the grand manner that has almost vanished from our stage, and for which, perhaps, the play should not be missed.
And so to Colin Spencer's Spitting Image, which transferred last week from the Hamp- stead Theatre Club, and in which a devotedly domestic pair of queers produce a baby. Con- sternation at the Home Office, not to mention among wary theatre-goers. But it is a' pleasure to find a theme as unpromising, indeed as alarmingly slight, as this one treated for once so gaily and with such unsentimental charity. Mr Spencer has a sharp ear, a nice feeling foe's shape and balance, and a dotty sense of
humour; he is well served by a fine cast (Derek Fowlds and Julian Holloway as our luckless heroes, Susan Williamson, dismayed but not downhearted, as their unluckier girl-friend, with Lally Bowers on top form and Frank Middlemass thrown in for decoration) in an admirably lucid production by James Roose- Evans. At the International Theatre Club,
Franco Brusati's La Fastidiosa is a fairly steamy
tale of family life and hard times in contem- porary Italy; no great shakes, save for a per- formance of uncanny brilliance and authority by a young American actor, last seen with the American Theatre Project at this enterpris- ing theatre and of whom I hope we shall see more, named Michael Warren Powell.
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