Grandeur and dismay
Kenneth Hurren
The only new thing in the London theatre last week was a theatre. It is hardly conceivable that you could have missed reading that the National Theatre—talked about for over a century, actively planned for over a quarter of a century and in course of building since November 1969— IS open at last, though only in part and still in course of building. For a place that seemed dedicated to a reticent, sotto voce, almost surreptitious beginning, because the interior is still only half completed and decorated=there is no concentration on a single date to mark the present introductory season', 'there won't be an opening Production as such', 'the NT will evolve gradually'—it can only be said that it has backed into the limelight very neatly and extravagantly indeed. Even theatre reviewers have been persuaded that it is somehow their duty to review the theatre— as a piece of architecture—which is almost as though the aesthetic impact of the Shell building were to be judged by motoring correspondents.
In venturing upon that impertinence Myself, I feared I might be biting off rather more than I could eschew. Watching the building grow over there on the South Rank of the Thames like some forbidding fortress where the art of the drama might barricade itself against philistine marauders, I doubted that I should ever take it to my heart, which is so implausibly entranced by our picturesque old theatres, redolent of More gracious ages than this one. Now that it is there, though, it has its own grandeur. Its architect, Denys Lasdun, has achieved a remarkable congruity with river and skyline, and inside the building—as some of us were able to see last week—has done even better. His subtly illuminated, Wood-grained, white-concrete walls exude the elegance of simplicity where I had feared the sternness of austerity, and his lowered ceilings, discreet carpeting and tricks with suspended platform levels and walls that seem never quite to meet each other vertically produce in the foyers, bars and buffet lounges of the Lyttelton Theatre a sense of intimacy in harmony With spaciousness.
The Lyttelton is the only one of the National's three auditoria so far in oPeration. Still to open are the Olivier and the Cottesloe. The former, with its open stage (not quite an apron, more perhaps a Pinafore) and vaunted technical resources, Will eventually be regarded as the main theatre and is where the company's classical repertory will play; it will doubtless delight everyone except, possibly, the stagehands' union which is already dis
turbed by the number of man-hours of overtime likely to be lost by the efficient arrangements for changing the sets of one play for those of another. The small Cottesloe, an experimental 'studio' theatre, is intended to come up with ideas that will invigorate the company's more formal endeavours, and [have a couple of fingers crossed in the hope that the fears of its becoming a haven for the more playful excesses and futilities of the 'fringe' will prove to have been greatly exaggerated.
Once the Olivier is available for use, the Lyttelton will stage plays of our own century, some of them new, and seasons built around some particular theme or playwright. For the present, however, it has five plays selected from those staged over the past year at the Old Vic. Theoretically, the range of choice is perfectly balanced—Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett, Osborne, Ben Travers—but when I look closer this, for me, is where the kissing has to stop.
Other reviewers, who saw them all again last week in their new surroundings, seem to have been quite pleased with them and, in some cases, there were even revisions of previous adverse opinions. For my part, I can revise none, and on two specific counts I was especially dismayed. A year ago I was hopefully pleased that the National had got Happy Days out of its system before the day came for the move into the new building, since 'the prospect of that long-delayed curtain ultimately rising, in that great hush of expectancy, upon a stage occupied solely by a mound of ash, in which one of our theatre's most distinguished ladies is buried up to her ribs, has about it the aura of an anti-climax of such nightmarish absurdity that it might be wondered whether the institution could ever recover'. I was exaggerating, of course, but not so frivolously .that I was not astounded almost into incredulity when that curtain did, in fact, rise for the first time on Happy Days, even if only to the first of last week's invited audiences.
This week's first public performance to a paying audience gave me no compensatory comfort. In expressing a testy reaction to the company's Hamlet three months ago, and recording what was then no more than a rumour, I remarked that 'while the move into the new Theatre [was] being planned without the fuss and fanfare once envisaged, to move in with this Hamlet [would be] not so much low profile as defiant scowl'. Defiantly, on Tuesday, they scowled, and I am grieved to say that neither Albert Finney's aggressively ill-spoken, weatherbeaten Hamlet nor the production as a whole has improved in the merest particular. To say that Finney, in some of his speeches, gets every inflexion unerringly wrong is only, perhaps, to express a difference of opinion; but how, for trifling example, he is able to go on obstinately night after night hailing the arrival of the strolling players before he has opened the door that reveals to him their presence, when more than one notice has drawn the foolishness to his attention, is beyond comprehension.
No doubt there are reasons to do with artists' contracts and commitments that precluded making the choice of the opening quintet of productions from the full recent repertory. It is a pity, nonetheless, that the company's most magnificent production of last year, that of Heartbreak House, could not have been included: in place, possibly, of John Gabriel Borkrnan, in which Ralph Richardson's performance seems to have so far deteriorated that the perilous last act verges upon the farcical and was not assisted last week by antic lighting and uncertain mechanics, although it is fair to say also that Peggy Ashcroft's performance, true and thoughtful and immensely composed, is as impressive as anything the Lyttelton has presently to offer.
The repertory is completed by Plunder— an innocuous bit of fun put on in generous tribute to its venerable author, Ben Travers, though I should be sad to hear that anyone at the National felt it to be in the same street as a play or as entertainment with their recent revival of The Playboy of the Western World—and finally Osborne's Watch It Come Down, the only entirely new play the company had handy, though Tony Harrison's version of Racine, Phaedra Britannica, might qualify in that category and would have made me squirm less; and 1 daresay I shall be thought impish in mentioning a not too distant National success, Peter Shaffer's far worthier Equus, which is to be revived instead, commercially, at the Albery next month.
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