Why can't a woman be more like a man? : :ARTS
mum SKIRLING
Simon Gray's new play, Wise Child, at Wyqd- ham's, deals with a pretty and suggestive youth
• , much given to curling his hair in a handmirror. Jerry divides the rest of his time between fend- ing off the attentions of a furtive, depressed . and lonely hotelkeeper and fawning on his .elderly mum: a hulking male criminal dreSsed in drag who much prefers the opposite sex, here represented by a black receptionist of sub- normal intelligence. Plays about kinks, freaks, perverts, necrophiliacs, and teenage brothel- keepers who do it for sweets are not hard to ,come by these days, and this one already shows signs of being a resounding commercial suc- cess. The reason is not far to seek. For, beneath ,;its, garnish of sadism, violence and sexual dis- play—which, as so often, prove sadly tame• in the, flesh—Mr Gray's theme is reassuringly familiar: 'I want always to be a little bpy and . have fun; so I ran away to Kensington Gardens and lived a long time among the fairies.'
Given that his fairies are seedier, heavier and hairier than Barrie's, Mr Gray's world remains much the same: his hero, too, is encouraged to grow up, leave his mother and make his own way in the world. And Jerry's plight at this point is basically Peter Pan's, though stated rather more brutally: 'What you've got against the nigger is that she's a juicy woman; and against Booker that he's bent.' Not that this was only Peter Pan's problem. It is one of the central dilemmas in which English playwrights have regularly found themselves—caught between these two unpromising alternatives, what is a fellow to do? A large part of our drama for the past sixty years and more has been devoted to finding an answer.
Hence, for one thing, the shortage of women's parts worth playing. Mr Gray's receptionist, a barely speaking part, is needed only to be stripped, browbeaten and humiliated from time to time by the three men. Which is a logical extension of the tradition whereby women have been maltreated or ignored and consistently frustrated on the London stage this century. The physical ill-treatment of Janice, the excitement and repulsion with which the men discuss her smell or the sight of her flesh, are admittedly cruder but not in kind different from the con- ventional attitude which prevailed right up to the 'forties and early 'fifties: on the one hand, the* masterful love-making of, say, Gerald du Maurier in Sutro's The Chance, where he 'showed his affection for the woman he loved by smacking her on the jaw and turning his back'; on the other, Peter Pan's flinching when Wendy made suggestions: 'Oh, Peter, how I wish I could take you up and squdge you!' This squdging is, perhaps, the root of the trouble.
But more interesting than the physical squeamishness—displayed for instance in in- numerable shy proposal scenes—are the various punishments meted out, then as now, to members of either sex who insisted on seek- ing straightforward sexual satisfaction. Here we are dealing not with the marrying type whose feelings—like Jerry's for his 'mum'— tended to resemble `those of a devoted son,' but with the active Don Juan, generally depicted dui louche, seedy cad or con-man, and nearly always socially inferior. This type meets retri- bution in the shape of social humiliation (`the .man's a common little bounder,' Dear Octopus) _and, even occasionally, as in In Hay's Happy , Ending, death. His female counterpart, the flirt —a marauding sexpot from whom all the, men ,Aetreat in terror—is also invariably frustrated;
. her victims going to extraordinary lengths, flee- , ing often to the ends of the earth by rail or Union Castle, to escape her attentions. The masculine ideal here was achieved, of course, by Notl Coward's Garry Essendine: serviced ..by a bevy of adoring women who for various reasons—because they were too old, too stoutly built, had flat feet or a funny accent—presented no threat so that, when it came to the point, he need settle for none of them. Few heroes were so fortunate. Most in the end found themselves pounced on by some pallid lurking spinster and . forced to compromise: as Rattigan's hero put it, in French Without Tears, to his patient Jac- .queline : 'I'll tell you one thing, Jack. I like you so much it's sometimes quite an effort to re- member you're a woman at all.'
Strip Jack Naked was a game not much, if at all, played; which is the chief difference be- tween this kind of play and Mr. Gray's modern .article. Earlier playwrights wrote in the main about people who positively detested 'making scenes.' And, watching Mr Gray put in the scenes which used to be left out—the scene of masculine revenge, with Janice grovelling half- naked on the floor; the scene in which Jerry's mum sells him to the hotelkeeper; and the scene in which the unfortunate purchaser is promptly battered to death by the irate youth —one begins to see why. For Mr Gray is as re- luctant as his predecessors to explore motives and implications : his characters are sketchy, his wit rudimentary and his few situations rapidly exhausted. The result, like bad pornography, is somewhat numbing; enlivened only by a beguil- ing performance from Gordon Jackson, pink, shining and twitchy as the hotelkeeper, and by the extraordinary behaviour of Sir Alec Guin- ness as mum. But even Sir Alec, having dis- covered strange, minute details and an unsus- pected beauty in the way an elderly woman walks, stoops and scratches her leg, can find precious little else to show us. The play will no doubt find a market. Its theme has a broad appeal, always has had and still remains central to the English character. What is sad is that a subject so fascinating, and potentially so fruit- ful, should for so long have been treated only in these trite, crude and evasive terms.
Sweet Charity, at the Prince of Wales, deals
with another perennial. theme—the. Anieraon musical broine whose men-find it hard to come up to scratch: one runs screaming, another lets 4pr,spepd thy.: night in his wardrobe while he goes to bed with someone else (Walk about Swedish . Swedish movies!' murmurs Charity, eye at the keyhole, a third, pathologically shy, can't bring himself to do more than kiss her fingers. But this is by miles the best musical London has seen in. years. What makes it so is its energy, honesty, htimour and best of all the choreo- graphy by Bob Fosse—whose girls, powerful and muscular like Balanchine's ballet girls, with the same splendid calves and thighs like tree- trunks, are alone worth the money in numbers like 'Hey, Big Spender,' Rich Man's Frug' and the 'Rhythm of Life.'
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