Theatre
The last hero
Mark Amory
A Handful of Dust (Lyric Hammersmith) Yakety Yak (Half Moon) Ladies in Retirement (Fortune Thriller Theatre)
Objecting to a play being adapted from a V novel is so odd that I think it must hide some form of cultural snobbery. No one minds that, by way of random example, The Forsyte Saga was televised, Wuthering Heights filmed or La Dame aux Camellias made into both a ballet and an opera. So why not a play? It would be hard to main- tain that everyone who saw Nicholas Nickleby would have read it anyway and impossible to claim that if they did their ex- perience would have been identical. If readers are what you desire, it would be more plausible to suggest that some who did go would not bother to wade through it later, thus missing the authentic Dickens; but the huge sales of various books-of-the- film prove that wrong. Something will be lost during the change of form and in great works there is naturally more to lose. The most common transformation is the film- ing of a novel, when the elements that are most easily carried over are the plot, the set- ting, the characters and a certain amount of the dialogue. If these are the main strengths the result is likely to remain close to the original. What you cannot retain entirely is the novelist's prose style and personal voice which is why, again at random, Jane Austen and E.M. Forster dramatise disap-
pointingly and C.P. Snow is positively enhanced.
There are snags. A faithful adaptation may remind so strongly of the original that the smallest divergences irritate. Mike Alfreds's production of A Handful of Dust is minutely faithful but not realistic. There is only a permanent grey screen as set, which totters in sympathy when things go wrong, and the actors, dressed elegantly though not always suitably in grey, have on- ly grey chairs as props. They recite snatches of narrative and description as well as Evelyn Waugh's dialogue, which sounds ir- ritating but was not; it is true that 'voice over' rarely bothers me in the cinema, while I know it upsets some people dreadfully. Each actor plays many parts and if it is distracting to notice the skill with which a lounging member of a London club changes to a squatting South American Indian and then to a nervously mounted huntsman, it is also enjoyable. Many will be familiar with the story of Brenda Last leaving her rustic husband, Tony, for a tenth-rate socialite, John Beaver. Occasionally a line jars for technical reasons: when the actress playing Brenda says to the audience: 'she rubbed her cheek against his in a way she had', the effect is to make Brenda seem calculating, as the book does not. More generally, the men have become less dull, which may have been necessary if they were not to bore us. This slightly weakens the plot but more or less makes sense. Brenda's reason for going off with Beaver does not have to be so strong if he has- a slight spark of charm, nor is it, since Tony is really not so bad.
There is a major loss, but of a theme of which many happy readers remain unaware anyway. Tony Last is the hero of the play just as he is often taken to be the uncriti- cised hero of the novel. Waugh's remark about a civilised man falling among savages of two kinds is often quoted and there are indeed passages where he sympathises with Tony. However, he also said that A Hand- ful of Dust contained 'all I had to say about humanism' and what he has to say is that it is not enough. Faith is essential. Waugh became a Roman Catholic in 1930, the novel was published in 1934. There is a complication in the fact that Waugh is widely known to have been enthusiastic about Victoriana but to the jacket-designer he describes the much-restored house for which Tony is sacrificing all as 'the worst possible 1860'. Tony's vision in South America is similarly worthless. His ideals and code of behaviour are meant to be seen as inadequate, even as the cause of his downfall. Without this strand the story is the less but it remains amusing, moving and shocking, if a little long. When Brenda greets the news of her son's death with `Thank heavens!' (she feared it was her lover), there was an appalled intake of
breath behind me. So there should be. '
Yakety Yak is a vigorous musical about American high-school kids in the mid-1950s. They have lines like 'Love is a beautiful enriching experience. Did you lay her yet?' and, as in Hair, there is a lot of plot — prison, pregnancy, rumbles, an priest — which no one bothers to develop. Instead they (chiefly four McGann brother; and the Cherokees) belt out Lieber an Stoller numbers, familiar, if at all, from the Coasters. These remain much the sane', energetic and funny, though some date from before the coming of Rock'n'101 The Comets seem to have exploded without disturbing their style. I knew it was for tre from the first chorus of `Drip-DriPPetY Drop' and the audience, as the posters sal' stamped, whistled and cheered. This rote' sometimes engagingly amateurish sh°,`‘ should be seen in the Mile End R°3"; though it may well transfer to the Wes' End. Ladies in Retirement would be more suited to a respectable rep, say Wind°. Isabel Dean with her fragile beauty is stir' o prisingly cast as a dried up old spinster, wh is also the Lady Macbeth of Graves° capable of murdering for her family but rife of forgetting the deed (baleful glances at II! fireplace). Set in 1885 but first produced , 1939, the play has fewer twists than we rlt.°0ji expect. When Miss Dean cries, 'What s",e we do now?' we all know long before bpi does. So it is not thrilling or surprising, IL° pleasant enough for addicts, and Gilti Raine is entertainingly batty in a style t1, owes nothing to observation, everything to tradition.
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