ARTS & AMUSEMENTS
The Blackness of Whiting
, By ANTHONY BURGESS Saint's Day. (Stratford E.)--The Three Sisters. (Actors' Studio at the Aldwych.)—Mother Courage. (National Theatre.) Mite revival of Saint's Day has not, as far as 1 the critics are concerned, meant its re- habilitation. It still seems able to provoke rage or bafflement, which, from one point of view, can be taken as a testimony to its vitality, but few people are willing to forgive the puzzling tension that subsists between what the play is and what the play is about. We have always accepted that drama is more than plot, just as life is more than morphology: the story of Hamlet is found equally in the First Folio and the `bad' pirated quarto. But, we say, the differentials lie in language, construction, characterisation. Shake- speare abides our question. The strange thing is that when Whiting's play has been filleted of its story, nothing Shakespearian remains: there are no poetic or symbolic additives. And yet there is something very powerful, not transcendent (as Shakespeare transcends Saxo Grammaticus) but immanent.
The story is quite implausible. It is January 25, the feast of St. Paul's conversion, also the birthday of a distinguished but ostracised poet, very old, named Paul Southman. He lives with his granddaughter, Stella Heberden, and her painter husband Charles in an old house some way off a village. Cut off from the great world, they are also cut off from the smaller one, dis- trusted by the villagers and regarding the vil- lagers as enemies. But today the great world intrudes. Robert Procathren, a natty poet much seen in the Tatler, comes to bear the homage of once-hostile society and to take Paul to London for a grand birthday dinner. But Paul's old dog dies, and he blames the villagers. He will wage war against them and, to this end, gives Procath- ren a gun that he may assist in the battle. But Procathren accidentally shoots Stella, and his combed world becomes Medusa-haired. He allies himself with three marauding soldiers who have escaped from a glasshouse, helps to burn down the village, and finally persuades the soldiers to
hang Paul and Charles on two trees in front of the house.
Not only is the plot implausible, but even the details of the action. Stella expects the groomed important Procathren any minute, is agitated, about the kind of hospitality she can offer, but still won't get dressed. Everybody complains about the cold, but nobody will light a fire. Twenty- five years of exile seems a disproportionate punishment for Paul Southman's libellous squib. The villagers come and sit calmly in the house, despite the burning down of their homes; a child plays while Charles paints his dead wife on the wall. There is no alarm at the knotting of the nooses. The materials of the play arc naturalistic, but the wires of naturalism are crossed. And yet, in a mad way, there is a cer- tain subterranean logic, and this owes nothing to allegory. I kept thinking of Strindberg.
There are various overt themes, some of them familiar, even commonplace—the relationship of the artist to society, the nature of choice and of responsibility, the danger of letting reality loose on a human soul that can only equate action with violence. But take all the fish out of the tank, and there is always one—unnamable by ichthyologists—left swimming among the con- trived rocks and flora. Like Chirico's horses, Saint's Day appeals at a level inaccessible to the depth-psychologists. And, on the banal plane of dramatic experience, it coheres and convinces, it is—despite everything—a genuine play.
Music is itself, not a version of life, and we ought to be prepared for all art, however natur- ally disposed to representation, to approach its self-nourishing logic. Of all contemporary plays, Saint's Day comes closest to making its own world, one that touches ours at certain points but, between those points, goes looping off in fresh dimensions. That the Stage Sixty cast i§ at home in it is attested by the sureness of the acting; perhaps one has to play in Saint's Day before one.can fully understand it, just as one has to play jazz to know what jazz is. Michael Hordern returns to the part of Paul Southman after four- teen years: he claims the authority of an originator. Sheila Allen, as Stella Heberden, is pitiable and disturbing. Barry Justice brings to the part of Charles Heberden the right weak, callous, rebellious, finally insouciant tones. The night is probably David William's, however : his Robert Procathren progresses from glassy dilettantism to ultimate and horrible vindictive- ness with a mad and masterly directness. James Bree's study of a disintegrating priest is an almost intolerable baring of the nerves. David Jones's direction holds fast to a kind of sus- taining image of hell which never falters. The whole production is a triumph of dramatic craft.
I'm sorry to have to bring my own tones, of condemnation—in a critics' cacophony quite unanimous—to the Actors' Studio's deplorable rendering, or rending, of The Three Sisters. Chekhov, Stanislaysky, Lee Strasberg : the middle term ought to unite the two outer ones, but it didn't. The longueurs of provincial Russian frus- tration prolonged themselves in a• production which needed, God help us, four whole hours to demonstrate the inefficacy of the Method when unleashed on a 'classical' text. Kim Stanley, as Masha, strung long and inexplicable silences, in- visible beads of self-communion, on her lines; Sandy Dennis's technique of inflation was bird- like repetition. It was as though there was a premium set on sheer time-filling. Apart from all this, there was no sense of real fin de siecle Russia: if we were anywhere at all, it was in a doomed South waiting for a terrible slow sword, with Gone with the Wind officers to match. Some of the men tried hard to feel their roles, but all were encased in a cruel heresy. Thire's something very depressing about so bathetic an end to a season which was meant to embody a noble con- cept. There's something frightening, even tragic, in this collapse of a much-publicised reputation. It's like going at last to see Samarkand and find- ing it a sort of Bamber Bridge (Lancs).
To add to a week of depression -which only Whiting mitigated, I had to see Mother Courage at the Old Vic. Madge Ryan makes her pull that damned cart through the whole of the Thirty Years' War, using her very considerable talent to drum up a sympathy and concern which Brecht's fundamentally very feeble concept does little to promote. Here we have the very nub of that 'epic' didacticism which hammers away a' the self-evident and, because it's concerned with pain and waste more as doctrinal propo- sitions than as properties of human experience. is finally vicious and life-denying. Neither Auden's translations of the lyrics nor Paul Dessau's music can disguise the dramatic poverty of this weary morality. William. Gaskill directed, with consummate devotion, the whole thirty years of it.
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