Kenneth HurVen on
a catamite among the pigeons Bloomsbury by Peter Luke (Phoenix Theatre) The Marriage of Figaro by Beaumarchais, translated by John Wells; National Theatre Company (Old Vic) The Good Companions, adapted by Ronald Harwood from J. B. Priestley's novel; music by Andre Previn, lyrics by Johnny Mercer (Her Majesty's Theatre) The Bloomsbury Group, rich in eccentricity, pretension and even talent, lacked, perhaps, the vivacious bitchiness of the Algonquin wits of a later day, and I daresay their badinage fell short of the robustness associated with the Mermaid Tavern of a somewhat earlier one; nevertheless I had hoped that they might have been brought more stimulatingly to the stage than they are in Peter Luke's play at the Phoenix. The difficulties in the way of a wholly successful dramatisation are evident enough, and probably inherent in the people concerned, who were as much a trial as a delight to their admirers. If they were blandly impish in their disregard of conventional values, bold in their theorising and witty in their irreverence, there was also in them that tendency sometimes to seem sensationally less mature than their years and to lapse into those floridly whimsical methods of expression that can only be distressing to the judicious. Even so, their fascinations might well have outweighed their embarrassments, had not Luke been caught fatally between conflicting rather than complementary aspirations.
There is, on the one hand, the larger perception of Bloomsbury, implicit in his title and in the form of the work as it first appears and seems likely to develop, with Virginia Woolf (played with fey intensity by Yvonne Mitchell) recollecting the heyday of Lady Ottoline Morrell's arty salons. The promise is of the re-creation of that vanished world-within-a-world, confident of itself, minuscule perhaps in its interests and trivial in its hopes, populated by sophisticates living not so much on their wits as for them: pampered by each other and protected by their money, they are haunted only by the dread of being commonplace, a fate from which they will always be saved by their gifts, by some ultimate arrogance of mind, grace of paradox and elegance of mockery.
They are the very stuff, indeed, of high comedy and style, but that is not, I'm afraid, quite how the Luke portrait turns out, for he has, on the other hand, the idea of holding one of them — Lytton Strachey — in narrower focus, and the play dwindles into a waggish preoccupation with his homesexuality. Strachey is introduced by Virginia Woolf as "an etiolated spinster; forever musing on whether he dare make improper suggestions to the postboy," and he rarely seems very much more. It would hardly be guessed that the man was a literary figure of some importance, who revolutionised the art of biography. We see him delighted with the reviews of Eminent Victorians which forecast that he is to become "a household name" (almost like Syrup of Figs and Scott's Emulsion and the other patent medicines with which he is obsessed), but since, at least for the purposes of the play, the reviews coincide with Armistice Day, 1918, his literary achievement is quickly swept to one side as he gaily cries, "Let's all go up to London and pick up sailors!"
There are a great many other camp little jokes of that kind, which Daniel Massey — plausibly got up to look like Strachey, bespectacled and lavishly hirsute — delivers with great relish in the piping tones of an ageing castrato, and in a manner replete with several varieties of the arch, including the fallen. Massey sustains the personation unwaveringly and is sometimes able to hint at a characterisation that goes beyond the effete figure of fun, as in the frail dignity of his appearance before the conscientious objectors' tribunal — although I suspect that the scene is introduced and protracted less for that purpose than to be sure of getting in Strachey's famous riposte when asked what he would do if he were to come upon a German soldier raping his sister: "I should try to interpose my own body."
His relationship with the devoted Dora Carrington, and in the menage a trois with Ralph Partridge, is explored centrally and yet with little real depth or emotional insight, though Carrington is played by Penelope Wilton with a beautiful sensitivity that suggests that Luke might have made a more satisfying, instructive and effective play by concentrating wholly on this triangular situation. As things are, the attention paid to it seems both cursory and yet, to the extent that it is an incessant distraction from the Bloomsbury theme, excessive.
The latest National Theatre production, a non-operatic manifestation of the Beaumarchais comedy, The Marriage of Figaro, is the rough we should expect to take with the smooth, if there were any smooth in the National's repertory these days.
Jonathan Miller, who directs it, is well-known, of course, for his impatience with any sort of come(' 7 that relies upon felicitous artificiality Or well-heeled elegance; I was thus not altogether taken aback to discover that he had decided to populate the piece with flyblown pantomime grotesques (among them a larkish Welsh music master, an arthritic magistrate and a gardener closely related to Max Wail's father), or, indeed, that Count Almaviva seemed to have fallen upon such bad times that his castle — so far as could be judged from the dingy back projections that serve as scenery — had become an Andalusian version of Hardup Hall. In the circumstances, though, I fear I was somewhat less than carried away by the theme that contrasts the lot of masters and servants, by the wit of the text and by the reputedly inflammatory nature of its sentiments. The idea of staging the work in this way and without the benefit of Mozart's music seems as perverse as turning Oklahoma! back into Green Grow the Lilacs.
On the question of whether or not the addition of music is an advantage, I cannot feel strongly one way or the other in the case of The Good Companions. The turn-titurn songs by Previn and Mercer do the old Priestley yarn no harm, but I'm dubious about whether they do it enough good to give it another whirl of life, especially as the performers are not, on the whole, distinguished for their singing, and there does seem to be an element of wanton cruelty in allowing 'The Good Companions'—the appalling troupe of touring pierrots, whose adventures the show is about — to demonstrate quit, ',ow awful they are. This a, inocuous old-fashione,, .,,..,gary in its sentiments as to be almost diabetic, in which Christopher Gable gives a notably engaging performance as a teacher-turned-songwriter on behalf of the pierrots; Judi Dench contributes some classy acting as their good fairy; and old John Mills, as a gnarled little Yorkshireman in a cloth cap, gets to do a tap-dance to a reception that could easily seem a little fulsome if he had actually risen from the dead.
Previous page
