Theatre
Beat 'em or Join 'em
By ALAN BRIEN THE title of this play gives you immediately a clue to what is wrong with it. You just cannot have a velvet shotgun. I know it is a metaphor, but it is a sloppy, blurred metaphor which is trying to be smart and clever and has succeeded only in being silly and smart. You can have a rubber shotgun which buckles when you stick it in the reluctant bride- groom's back. You can have a licorice shotgun which your victim bites in half. You can have a golden shotgun which you daren't fire because it is worth more than you are. But you just cannot have a velvet shotgun.
Mr. Taylor's comedy is intended to be terribly daring and contemporary and outspoken and yet box office. It is meant to warm over The Dud Avocado and George Dillon for the middle- aged middle-brow audience which gets a thrill out of alternately tutting and tittering among its tea- trays. Its heroine is one of these mad, gay, saucy, rich Chelsea girls who fascinate taxi-drivers and headwaiters and landladies with their slangy off- colour jokes and their endearingly insolent demands. She is pregnant—a disability in her world roughly equivalent to growing out dyed hair—and she plans to blackmail the father into a temporary marriage for two years, at the end of which she will lay siege to an earlier lover and marry him. Meanwhile, by the blinding light of her neon charm, she has hypnotised a brilliant young philosopher, the pretty daughter of an Admiral, and a spiky old spinster into waiting upon her in her basement hide-out.
If only she were also broke, she would be as greedy a fledgeling cuckoo as George Dillon. But Mr. Taylor intends her to be a sympathetic character—or so I assume from the reactions of people around me. Personally, as played by Sarah Marshall, I found her as attractive as a fork scraping down a window pane. Miss Marshall has that special brand of elaborately forced spon- taneity found only among the ducal families of theatre-land—she seems to be acting an actress not acting in order not to embarrass the ordinary folk who have only the faces God gave them. With her wide cigarette-case grin, her musical- comedy eyes, her Rain Gopal hand sema- phore, she might be Jessie Mathews getting tiddly in ever such a relined way in a pre-war British film. Except that she has a North American accent as has the faithful hound-dog who gets her in the end—Conrad Janis. Both are described as Canadians. I suppose there is no reason why an author should not write a play set in Britain with two Canadian leading roles. But it did remind me of those Hollywood war films shot in Britain where every department of the armed forces turned out to have a 'Canadian' in control so as to disguise the import of American stars.
1 doubt if it is fair to blame Miss Marshall for this gossip-column parody of a young girl she presents. Mr. Taylor's dialogue is so unbearably cute and knowing that even a BBC newsreader could not be trusted to read it straight. Presum- ably, too, Mr. Frith Banbury, the director, must also share sbme of the brick-bats. He has allowed, or instructed, Michael. Danvers-Walker to. play the English father of the child as such an eye- twitching, spluttering falsetto silly ass as would seem over-acted in a television comedy series— even in The Army Game. And Wynne Clark, as the stock comic landlady, seems occasionally to be playing The Game rather than the game. But most of the time Miss Clarlf stands out as the one real honest professional who knows exactly what effect she wants to produce and produces it.
The Velvet Shotgun is perhaps hardly worth all this censorious analysis. But I am afraid that, as with The Party at the New Theatre, we are in for a wave of pseudo-new-theatre where the old superficial tricks and the old safe sentimentalities will be given a new lease of elistence by being tagged on to themes and characters which are merely smudged carbons of the too dangerous originals.. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, is the motto of the commercial theatre. And preferably join 'em with you on the outside and them on the inside like a boa constrictor.
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