Theatre
Full moon
Ted Whitehead
The impressive thing about Alf Garnett (The Thoughts of Chairman All, Criterion) is that he really feels the things he says he feels; he hasn't invented them and he hasn't watered them down for our benefit either. He starts from the premise that 'We was all Christians to start with and all happy.' and he is bewildered by what has gone wrong. His pantheon includes Hold VIII, Shakespeare (who came from StraY ford East, where he wrote The TemPest): Mary and Joseph (who were English but went over there for the oil), 'West Ha° United and the breweries. His Pande' monium includes Marx, Engels, Talln.Y miners (with faces full of holes from trying to eat with a knife and fork). Edward Heath (grammar school twit), Women's Lib (she says half the house is hers but if so it's stud' to my half and it's staying there), and ad gallery of alien creatures from Jews all, Scousers to Frogs, Krauts and non-v/1111,a: of every kind. He is particularly puzzled v; the fact that he has lived all his life la, slum in Wapping 'behind enemy lines.„ when he should obviously be living I" Virginia Water 'with the other side.' Alf doesn't feel hostile to women as 0,11,, 'nice friendly little creatures,' created. " God for the purpose of scrubbing, cooking. and washing up. And for sex too, of course', but he's not entirely happy here. and thInkri' there should be a 'sex on wheels' service rn., by the National Health, or that men shoulus at least be able to transfer their 01 periodically, like footballers. He caPs this with a song to 'My Dear Old Dutch. ,e Warren Mitchell, with Ronnie Cass at tale piano, and with no more props than a hit piano, a couple of chairs, is achingly funnY anoe desperately frightening; while he is on e it is impossible to separate him from character he is playing. He is rivetingie stumping stiff-legged about the ta.b driven by bigotry and pietism; slumped Inci chair, glass in hand, filled with self-nitY „d served under eleven Prime Ministers at't;e was poor under all of them); needlmth audience, and turning aside hecklers vl'ori t he ease of an old pro ('Is there a full 111° tonight?). .1011Y Johnny Speight has created a bean°, ve rounded character: a man who doesn't humanity, because he doesn't think hunwhat ity is particularly lovable; he thinks t humanity needs a leader, and his tragedYnil that he knows he isn't one. hut does know where to find one. The working-class Fascist to the life.
Chairman Alf would no doubt agree with lehn Berger, who has come over from France for the production of a play based O n his book A Seventh Man at Hampstead. that : 'Fascism is on the agenda. It will be of a British kind, but it will be Fascism.' The Play is about migrant workers in Europe— peasants who have left their povertystricken villages to work on the assembly line in a West German construction corn
Y. The thesis is that capitalism seduces the innocent peasantry with its promises of cash, cars, flash clothes and sex, and then exploits them in an inhuman industrial environment in which they become trapped: they'll never be happy with this city life, but theY are rejected by their own villagers when they attempt a return. I suspect that All would approve of the Play insofar as he would say that these Sad dagoes should never have left 'heir 'orrible 'uts in the first place; but I am Sure he would find the piece both disingenuous and ill-timed, when West Gernlan workers are themselves worried about eritet.ing, or keeping, jobs on the assembly I haven't read Berger's book, but I am told that it is a dispassionate study of a serious and growing problem, and that it akes out a convincing case against the international -recruiters. The play, by Adrian Mitchell, does not. In fact, it undernlihes its case by making an all-out attack urban and industrial life generally. It sT,.h°‘‘'s not the faintest awareness of why r°PIe have chosen to congregate in cities, tr°h1 Ur to Rome to DOsseldorf, but clings ° a nostalgic vision of happy families in "ilanic villages. One man says that in his When you do a good deed, you can ,n,ear the echo.' (Yes, and when you do a :ad deed, you can hear the echo too, with ihVengeance.) The language is riddled with bals sort of pseudo-poetry, exposing the ,nalitY of the basic concept. he images of women in the piece range is°111 Mother to Gauleiter to Whore. There °ne wide-eyed scene where a worker who vy "s had a 'breakdown is 'cured' by a night the whore—ah, the therapeutic power °I. ove solt is a long time since I have seen anything k self-assured and so sentimental. Roland weesss Foco Novo production is hardatcl)king and earnest, relieved by some songs bY the acting of Stefan Kalipha and intatiord Gordon. One line of dialogue stuck v„,111Y mind, from a scene in which the Cunteers are medically examined: 'One in t must fail.' The ratio is higher in the
atre
the he National's latest kamikaze attack on audience is The Force of Habit by the L ygt"rian writer Thomas Bernhard. at the car telton Theatre. The setting is a circus fr:ivan, the characters a collection of s`„gics, the action an attempt to rehearse infnubert's Trout Quintet, the meaning "tile: that habit gets us through our
pointless days, or 'Everything is ridiculous when one thinks of death,' as the author himself says. (Actually it was only when I shed my theism and realised that the number of minutes left to me was finite that I began to be glad of them.) The play is also a tired satire on the idea of Art as salvation. Its inspiration is taedium vitae, a feeling I fully shared during the performance.
At one point there was a sound of loud snoring, which I took to be disrespect on the part of the audience, but which turned out to be an off-stage lion. This was an inventive stroke in an otherwise leaden production by Elijah Moshinsky. Gawn Grainger camped it up dreadfully as a juggler: Oliver Cotton was fitfully amusing as a clown; and Brenda Blethyn gallantly offered the sole image of womanhood, as a bottomwaggling nose-picking moron.
The German text is set down as free verse, though you would never guess it from this production, and carries an epigraph from (inevitably) Artaud : . but the line of prophets is extinct . . .' And about time too. It is written in a form involving constant verbal repetition and variation, in a half-baked attempt to emulate musical composition. I thought that if I heard the phrase 'Augsburg tomorrow' once more I would scream. Augsburg tomorrow? One in five must fail ? Is there a full moon tonight ?
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