Contemporary Arts
The Heroes
tot The Rape of the Belt. By Benn gab N, 60 Levy. (Piccadilly.)—Dinner with the Family. By Jean Anouilh. (New.)
ZEUS: I say, Polly, what about a stiff nectar before lunch?
And so on, and so on. I do not wish to imply that Benn Levy's methods are as crude as this, but all comic plays about the Greek gods and heroes are constructed on this principle and The Rape of the Belt is no exception. The trouble is that the poor old things are such sitters for satire. They have just enough pomposities to make them tempting targets and too little importance for any- one to be offended if they are hit. It was a different matter when Homer or Euripides mocked their adulteries and peculations—it all mattered dread- fully, the laughs were defiant and sacrilegious. But nowadays when Olympus sounds most like a film company and Themiscyra like a scrubbing pow- der, the whole business has become too easy, and at the same time pointless—the laughs are affec- tionate but pitying, a little self-satisfied.
Mr. Levy has taken as his text the ninth labour of Hercules (or Herakles as he is called in U- circles). This, as every schoolboy used to know, is the adventure of The Girdle of Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, but Mr. Levy's version of the story differs from the original in several important respects. Theseus and Herakles arrive at Themiscyra breathing chivalrous fire and slaugh- ter to find that the famous Amazons are peaceable creatures given, admittedly, to killing their male babies and shutting up their menfolk (what are left of them) in a stud farm, but quite unprepared to fight except with straightforward female weapons, and equally unprepared to relinquish the girdle.
For two acts orthodox methods are quite enough to defend the belt, for the two hulking bullies fall in love with the queen and her tricksy sister; it is only when Hera (who has been watch- ing the proceedings with her husband and taking barbed bets on the result) takes a hand and stirs the AmazOns to martial preparations that things begin to go awry. Force provokes force and the girdle goes to the victors. This is a tale with a moral no doubt exemplary at the time of the NATO meeting; it is also mildly witty and pleasantly sophisticated. None the less one cannot help feeling that Mr. Levy might have raised a more amusing and even more edifying play on slightly less cultivated soil.
His actors play, as they should, with great light- ness of heart. John Clements in an enormous pair of buskins has sufficient inches but, one suspects, a great deal too much intelligence, for Herakles. Richard Attenborough suits his actions with great adroitness to Herakles's rather unkind description of Theseus as 'that little toad.' Kay Hammond and Constance Cummings as the two queens are delicious; Miss Hammond at her most outrageous is a flirtatious tease, Miss Cummings an angel of gracious goodness.
One spends most of Dinner with the Family wondering when the blow is going to fall. Two acts tick away and still innocence remains un- defiled, there is still the chance that the young hero will escape the taint of his riches, still the hope that everyone will live happily ever after. Can this really be Anouilh? It can; and the blow never falls. This is a very early piece rose, in which all the later brilliance may be drunk, as it were, in its unfermented state; the first act indeed, in which the hero sets the stage for a gigantic hoax of his girl, is the most intoxicating, 100 proof Anouilh we have yet sampled, but bitterness never really intrudes. The Oxford Playhouse Company, under Frank Hauser, do not rise to great heights even with the considerable imported talents of Jill Bennett and John Justin in the main parts. Never- theless, the first magical act is not to be missed.
DAVID WATT
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