THEATRE
Three Larks and a Wren
Wwill meet; and there we may rehearse more obscenely and courageously.' Words, first used by Nick Bottom the Weaver, which must often be on William Gaskill's lips these days. Middleton's Chaste Maid in Cheapside is enough to daunt anyone with less ebullience than these two—a rambling, wittolly hodge- podge with five plots chiefly linked by an un- shakeably jaundiced view of human nature. Above all not a play to amble at. Mr. Gaskill runs at it full tilt, and a most obscene, gay and courageous job he has made of it, even to put- ting childbirth on the Royal Court stage at last. No doubt the Lord Chamberlain made a note.
`Honesty wash my eyes, I've spied a cuckold' (or a capon or a lecher or a whore) is the general burden of the play. The style of this production is pantomime, played with furious conviction, and kept in check by the surly undertow of Middleton's voice running through it. As at the Palladium, so at the Royal Court, dress is an expression of personality rather than period: there is Avril Elgar as the barren wife, her features twisted with passion above a discreetly self-effacing Edwardian walking-dress; Victor. Henry, up from the university in his duffle coat, gleaming morosely through his spectacles and convulsing his audience in Latin; and Sebastian Shaw—loud checks and eyeglass—who plays Sir Walter Whorehound as a bold, bad, baronet, condescending, perspiring and finally done down. 'If ever eyes were opened,' cries Sir Walter in a fume on finding all his friends prepared to see him ruined, 'if ever eyes were opened, these are they.' A phrase Bertie Wooster might have coined. In fact what chiefly emerges from this produc- tion is the splendid language (spruced up but not noticeably cleaner) and the sense that many of these Londoners are in our midst today. Not least Christopher Benjamin as Allwit, a moody host at a party halfway through, who stands eyeing the depredations of his guests and counting the cost as they shuffle up his rushes, spill his wine and scoff his sweetmeats. Gloomily picking through a side-dish, he finds all the long plums have gone : 'They've left nothing here but short wriggle-tail comfits, not worth mouthing.' Perhaps the funniest line is Ronald Pickup's, who plays the capon in a monocle, bend- ing droopily before the wind of his wife's recrimi- nations. His final complacent announcement of a happy issue caps a long line of inventive euphemisms: 'My wife has quickened. I think I've bestirred my stump, i'faith.'
Stumps stir like fury in the French farce at Hampstead, directed very fast by Richard Cottrell. The curtain rises on a dumpy little housewife in apricot figured silk, facing a seedy, red-faced gent on a shabby gilt chair. Both are expertly stuffing cartridges with spoons dipped in little earthen pots. From the tiff going on it is clear that he is her lover, the cartridges are the husband's and she first told her love when the parakeet died: 'Just you and me and the poor little corpse.' It seems absurd on the face of it. Any moment a rhinoceros may amble in. The whiff of Ionesco adds a new piquancy to Feydeau, whose characters are driven berserk by nothing more bizarre than the everyday follies of grocer and brothel-keeper.
You Never Can Tell is a straightforward piece of sentimental Victoriana, part of the current Shaw revival through which we can escape to a vanished world of parasols and spats and women's rights. If the play is a trifle thin, the actors fill it out—notably Celia Bannerman and James Hunter as the Terrible Twins, and Judy Campbell as the supposed feminist, who surely cannot mean us to believe that she takes Shaw seriously when he says that she has never had an affair in her life? The action passes mostly in a seaside hotel, everyone's dream of childhdod holi- days, designed by Motley, lit by Joe Davis and apparently run single-handed by Ralph Richard- son.
Three larks and a wren by Beckett: Act With- out Word& by students from Birmingham, was the wittiest thing in the West End last week, as anyone gathering rosebuds at the St. Martin's
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