THEATRE
The valet of the dolls
KENNETH HURREN
Partly because of an incorrigibly benign disposition, and partly because of a reluctance to abuse your patience with a further assault on the aberrations of the National Theatre, I have been in no hurry to remark on the production of George Btichner's play, Danton's Death, at the New; but the moment can de delayed no longer. The awful thing about this show is that I'm sure it's all so terribly well meant; which means, as it usually does, that it's intolerably patronizing. It is just possible, for instance, that Paris in the spring of 1794, with characters like Danton, Robespierre and St Just on hand, would suggest to you that a great many people have lately lost their heads, but Jonathan Miller's direction is aimed at spectators less quick on the uptake. His stage is dominated by gauzily transparent display cases, and there are backcloth projections of galleries of still more such cases, in all of which stand the costumed, headless models of the victims of the Revolution's rough-and-tumbril. It's an ingeniously designed set (by Patrick Robertson), and not insurmountably obtrusive, but it is all too indicative, I fear, of Dr Miller's plodding insistence on underlining the obvious.
Btichner, a typhus victim at twentythree, wrote the play two years before his death, bringing to it an intellectual vigour remarkable in one so young, and an analytical detachment equally remarkable in one who was himself, by all accounts, fervently committed to revolutionary causes. His drama is impersonal and impartial, the passionate clash of individual temperaments and philosophies subordinated to his own eloquent statement of the determinist view; but neither the eloquence nor the determinism is quite enough for the busily inventive Miller, who interprets every metaphor with numbing literalness. If, in Bilchner's conception, his characters are the helpless dolls of destiny, in Miller's they become literally puppets, with the director as their puppet-master, the valet of the dolls. They are brought on, stiff-limbed and waxenly pallid, to serve their turn, and to be returned again to their boxes. Within this glum convention Danton is played with embittered worldweariness by Christopher Plummer, Robespieere with icy punctiliousness by Charles Kay, St Just with rasping fanaticism by Ronald Pickup, but they can never achieve any compelling urgency in a production that drains the life and tensions from Bilchner's drama and embalms its naturalism.
Alec Guinness is at no such disadvantage in John Mortimer's piece, A Voyage Round My Father, at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, though he makes light of another that may be even more formidable. Laurence Olivier once owned that, as an actor, he would rather be deprived of his voice or his limbs than of his eyes — which is an indication of the achievement of Sir Alec, who plays the role of a blind man here with hypnotic accuracy.
The play itself has been much improved since its appearance at Greenwich last December, focusing more tightly on its central figure, Mr Mortimer's barrister father who lost his sight in middle-age but continued to practise his profession and generally elected to ignore his affliction. Whatever dramatized orgies the recent exploits of the author may have led you to expect, the entertainment is gentle and civilized — " an examination," as Mr Mortimer has put it, "of vanished memories and defeated manners," an evocation of pre-war, middle-class England and a remembrance of growing up in a household touchingly dedicated to ensuring that his father should never, have publicly to acknowledge his blindness. Mr Mortimer may rejoice that the memories have vanished and be elated over the defeat of the manners, but his play is less a celebration than a sigh, its most provocative reference to sex in the old
fellow's unenthusiastic remark that it has been "greatly overrated by the poets " and is "pretty uphill work if you want my opinion," Come to think of it (and with his advocacy in the recent Old Bailey jinks in mind, it is hard not to think of it), he really couldn't be blamed for over-reacting.
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