ARTS & AMUSEMENTS
You Know it Well, Reader
By HILARY SPURLING
L'Ecole des Femmes. (Old Vic.)—Too True To Be Good. (Strand.)—The Marriage of Mr.
Mississippi. (Hampstead Theatre Club.)— A Month in the Country. (Cambridge.)— The Four Seasons. (Saville.) BBlastmonster was stalking the boards last week: Turgenev's characters succumbed to it, Shaw's fought it off, Diirrenmatt and
Wesker unleashed it rampant on their audiences, only Moliere had it beat. The Canadian company
in L'Ecole des Femmes had no need to resort to sleight-of-hand to stave off boredom. Mostly we were invited to concentrate on two or more actors, side by side, facing forwards, gesturing as little as possible, and delivering Moliere's characters: a delicious Agnes, a modest and swaggering Horace, a pair of suitably pea- brained housekeeper's, above all Arnolphe, gor- geous in plum-coloured coat, lace collar and plumed hat.
Arnolphe is by no means a sympathetic character : complacent from the first, un- charitable, self-centred, tyrannical, short-sighted, in fact a comic hero who thoroughly deserves to be foiled at every turn. Nor does he improve with time: at the end of the play, humiliated, beaten, howling file a beast, he has no more grasp of his own motives than he had when luck was on his side at the beginning. The dif- ference is in his audience. He may never under- stand what has happened, nor why, but we do, having watched him toil endlessly uphill, falling two steps backward for every blithe step for- ward, never learning that disappointment is bitter in proportion to the sweetness of hope. M. Jean Gaseon gave us a sensitive, if curiously sotto voce performance, careful, detailed, touch- ing, perhaps a thought too amiable. It lacked that touch of the true heroical-grotesque.
Shaw, of course, needs more of a helping hand, and bands stretched forth on every side at the Strand last week. The last twenty minutes of Too True To Be Good are. as Shaw points out, enough to disperse any audience, but in this case it wasn't simply politeness that made us sit through them. Dora Bryan, seeing no hope of escape, sat down on a rock at one side of the• stage, folded her hands in her, lap and composed her featt...es -sky-blue eyelids, niascara'd lashes, rosebud mouth and powdered cheeks--into an expression of blank attention. Having arranged her face to her satisfaction, as if it were a bowl of flowers she could now safely leave on the hall table, Miss Bryan seemed to forget about it altogether. The lashes fluttered °nee or twice, occasionally a gloved hand stole UP to arrange the chiffon at her neck, otherwise not even a' yawn disturbed her stillness. This was a production full of plums, begin- ning with the parrot-green chinoiserie bedroom by Mr. Torn Lingwood on which the curtain rises. A premonition that Athene Seyler cannot re far behind has barely settled on the audience her before she flutters through the door, wringing , Pale pampered hands, a frail, agitated, help- old old lady who has never been crossed in her lie• In the arid desert of Act 2, a brave card- board Union Jack juts stiffly from its pole above th • c rickety camp table which signifies Army HQ among the sand dunes. No drooping or waving
in the breeze for the British flag, at least not when it flies over Colonel Tallboys, VC, DSO, in the person of Alastair Sim, an experienced commanding officer with a penchant for water- colours and a yen for the KGB. Over the years Mr. Sim has brought the portrayal of this par- ticular character to a fine point. He can now play it in exquisite slow motion.' And the desert has yet another joy in store: James Bolam's inscrutable Private Meek, who, from the moment he lopes in with toes pointed in an,exaggerated slow march, identifies himself as one capable of goading any superior to the brink of frenzy.
Shaw's argument—that the rich are ham- strung by their wealth—is, as he says, adequately stated in Act 1, and not appreciably advanced by Acts 2 and 3. There is no need to take his discontented rich girl on a joy-ride to Asia in order to prove that idleness cannot cure bore- dom. No need to venture outside that stuffy, overcrowded bedroom, but Shaw is a playwright easily bored by the prospect of exploring much below the surface. Hence the succession of toys— the microbe with measles who is cured, like Tinker Bell, by an effort of the human will, the Union of Federated Sensible Societies, the bearded Elder—to be played with and soon dis- carded. Happily none of them interferes with his gift for creating readily identifiable characters. handsome vessels with good clean lines waiting to be filled by the subtle actors at the Strand.
Shaw understood very well that a playwright has to be careful if he wants to indulge him- self in a three-page sermon; Dtirrenmatt, with a reckless disregard for consequences, provides no distracting listeners, no distractions of any kind, when one of his characters—`the only one whom he loved with all his passion'—approaches the audience to relieve himself of a pressing harangue. The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi has a plot which takes two hours to unfold, a plot of such complexity that there is no room for anything else Herr Darrenmatt adheres to a system:
If I merely show two people sitting together and drinking coffee while they talk abi.nit the weather, politics or the latest fashion, then I provide neither a dramatic system nor dramatic dialogue, no matter how clever their talk.
He therefore habitually puts poison in one or both cups, 'to add pique, drama, double meaning.' The fallacy of this argument is that poison is not piquant in a vacuum; in a world where people float past upper-floor windows, emerge from grandfather clocks and leap back to life as fast as they are shot down, there can be no risk, no surprises, no piquancy.
Sir Michael Redgrave devotes much of his time in A Month in the Country to trivial small- talk over the coffee cups. This is the play Shaw should have written if he had really cared about making his point. Boredom is the stuff of life in Turgenev's drawing-room: petulance at the card table, listlessness on the chaise-longue. Natalya's (Ingrid Bergman) love for her son's young tutor is the emanation of boredom itself. a fruitless surge of energy which has no other outlet. Within their sluggish element, Turgenev's characters unfold like Japanese paper water- flowers. Natalya's., gentle. complaisant husband wanders in from the farm at an awkward moment. A new winnowing machine has arrived. 'We've just got time before tea,' he offers, glancing at his wristwatch. 'care to see it?' Natalya looks away. Nothing stirs. 'Well, if you like, yes,' says Sir Michael faintly.
If Turgenev is generous to his actors, Arnold Wesker knocks his down and screws the lid on them. The Four Seasons tells the story of Sleeping Beauty and the Prince, spoilt by the playwright's inability to decide whether he wants it set in wonderland or Hampstead Garden Suburb. The Prince, when he lived in the world, was a university lecturer, the Princess had a comfort- able income and a professional husband. For an enchanted year they are freed from the telephone and the need to earn a living, but not from the nagging worries of affluence—class, sex and decorating the home. From the language—`your autumn-soft skin,' the pain that grows in the heart of a man,' the tender binding of a present, the intimate cooking of a meal'—one can only suppose that Mr. Wesker has been reading far too many ads.
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