Theatre
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Savoy) Four Nights in Knaresborough (Tricycle) Resident Mien (Bush)
Heritage rubbish
Sheridan Morley
As Ira Gershwin almost wrote in Porgy, 'Tess, You Ain't My Woman Now.' A musical staging of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles was probably inevitable sooner or later, given that movie audiences have had the catastrophic Roman Polans- ki/Nastassja Kinski version to drool over for all of 20 years, while the great Dame Wendy Hiller was to be found in the non- musical play way before the war. But Thomas Hardy has always been surprisingly boring off the page (anyone ever stay awake through all of Far from the Madding Crowd, even with Terence Stamp and Julie Christie and Alan Bates and Peter Finch, back in 1967?) and this new Tess manages to be terrible as well as terribly dull.
It is through-sung, in a yawning kind of way, and some of its lyrics have to be heard not to be believed. Whatever kind of a mil- lennial future the British stage musical has, it sure as hell is not this load of old her- itage rubbish: we open with a group of buxom, elderly milkmaids frolicking on the kind of village green last seen when the late David Whitfield was still playing Robin Hood in Palladium pantomimes circa 1955, and from there the score goes rapidly downhill. 'I expect you think we make our own kind of luck,' is an unlucky line in a scene which looks like a very old television commercial for toffee, and I bet you never guessed that 19th-century Dorset was full of chubby men sitting under cardboard trees plucking zithers in a moody, sub-Bou- blil and Schonberg kind of way.
A little later in an endless (near-three- hour) evening of wallowing, wittering gloom, the heroine is moved to ask 'Will I always be alone without the stars?' to which the answer is yes, dear, you'll be alone in the Savoy Theatre with just about the unstarriest supporting cast ever assem- bled, even for a regional British musical premiere. A little later still, the choral group of extra ladies, a kind of nightmarish singing sewing circle, announces that 'We are off to Melstock Church to pray', pre- sumably for the show to get better in the second half; alas, their prayers go unan- swered, since there are some backstage miracles that overtax even the Almighty.
All that happens at the end is that the doomed lovers have a final meeting at Stonehenge, where the stones are vastly more moving than the people, before Tess is carried off to jail for killing her evil preacher-man lover in the nick of time, only another song or two before he must have been due to die of boredom. At the performance I witnessed, most of the cast appeared to be alternates or understudies, and only looked really happy as the final curtain fell. I know just how they feel, but the truly sad thing is that a fiasco like this merely drives one more nail in the coffin of original British musicals; nothing theatri- cally good ever came out of Dorset anyway, except the first post-war British Theatrego- ers Club, founded there some decades ago by Graham Jenkins.
Richard Wilson, he who was Victor Mel- drew on television, has always had a sharp talent for directing new comic dramatists; last year he gave us Toast, an underrated and very funny account of five men in a derelict bakery. Now he has found some- thing still better: a hugely ambitious and entertaining first play by the journalist Paul Corcoran, which tells the story of the sub- sequent year in the lives of the four knights who murdered Thomas a Becket in Canter- bury Cathedral on 29 December 1170. Who were they, what did they think they were doing, and what happened to them on the run after their appalling and unGodly, albeit regally inspired, murder? Borrowing liberally from such varied sources as Sond- heim's Assassins, James Goldman's Lion in Winter and even the late Robert Bolt's Man For All Seasons, Corcoran sets up an anar- chic, often wildly funny quartet of neurotic, bisexual losers who are gradually, over the period of a year in which we see only four nights spent by the four knights in uneasy fireside chat, brought face to face with the full import of their crime.
There is always something comic about colloquial language set back a millennium or so; as in 1066 And All That, the knights reckon that their murder may not have been the best of all career moves, but to his credit Corcoran also wants us to consider issues of faith, life, infidelity, homosexuali- ty and death, as expressed by an uneasy and unlikely quartet who suddenly get caught up in the slipstream of history. They just happened to be there at the time; would we have done things differently and, if so, how and why?
Four Nights doesn't always work, and its last act slips dangerously close to porten- tous claptrap; but along the way we have learnt to know and even love these strange historical and military misfits, and Wilson has drawn wonderfully contrasted perfor- mances from James Purefoy, Jonny Lee Miller, Martin Marquez and Christopher Fulford. Happily we are a long way from Anouilh's Becket and even further from the pomposity of T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. This is the knights' version seen from the wrong side of the sword, and it makes for a diverting if diffuse evening as it tells, or at any rate invents, the most unknown of all Canterbury tales.
When, back in 1976, I first saw the State- ly Homo of England, Quentin Crisp, deliv- ering his lifestyle monologue on everything from household dust (`It gets no worse after the first five years'), through the career of Gilles de Retz who once mur- dered 150 choirboys Mow quantity is not style; still, it's hard not to be impressed'), to other people (They are usually a mis- take'), I wrote that his was the best if bleakest diary since that of John Aubrey in Brief Lives. Seeing Resident Alien, the new solo show about Crisp cobbled together at the Bush and played by Bette Bourne, it is hard not still to be touched by the self-con- fessed mail-order guru and his regret that he was not born female: `I'd have opened a knitting shop in Carlisle and been a part of life.' As it is, Crisp is now 91 (`To what do I attribute my longevity? Bad luck'), and, although it is lovely to have him back, I rather wish we had him in person rather than in Bourne's brilliant but inevitably secondhand impersonation. All the same, the advice remains wonderful (`Take care not to be the kind of person for whom the band is always playing in the other room'), and Mike Alfreds's production rightly emphasises the valedictory sadness here: `Life is the funny thing that happens to you on the way to the grave.'
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