THEATRE _
Fowl play
KENNETH HURREN
'A thing worth doing is worth doing badly' is a fair enough dictum for village hall amateur dramatics, but I don't think it quite covers the production of masterpieces in the West End of London.
To be more specific, it's no excuse for the enfeebled version of The Wild Duck which has limped into the Criterion from a pro- vincial tour, and which happens to be the first revival of this Ibsen play—a penetrat- ingly bitter exposition of the perils of mis- directed idealism and the value of illusions— that the town has seen these fifteen years. The generation that has grown up since then is not naturally attracted to works that speak less than respectfully of idealism and re- bellion, and I suspect that the attitude of the young towards the old Norseman—on the basis of' a production that fails dispiritingly to achieve the subtly satirical emphases—will be strongly tinged with apathy.
Most of the trouble with Glen Byam Shaw's direction, I think, is that it is infatu- ated with the elaborate symbolism of the undertow. It misses none of the persistent parallels between the plight of the wounded wild duck and that of the Ekdal family, in particular the daughter Hedvig, who are caring for it; but while all this has its place in the play, it is really not much more than decorative parsley. The meat of the business is what Bernard Shaw called its Vogl-comic slaughtering of sham Ibsenism,' in which the pivotal figure is the fanatical Gregers Werle, and you won't find much of that persuasive paranoiac in Alfred Lynch's sobersides per- formance. Mr Lynch gives the impression of knowing everything about Gregers except, unhappily, how to play him. He becomes a humdrum extension of Stockmann in An Enemy of the People (`All who live on lies must be exterminated like vermin') rather than the caricature Ibsen devised to qualify him and, in some sense, to satirise the
excesses of moral indignation in his own philosophy.
Deprived of its vital stanchion, the play collapses like a struck tent, but there is little evidence among the rest of the company that a salvage operation would be possible. As Gregers's principal victim, Hjalmar Ekdal, Michael Denison seems altogether too much taken with the man's own estimate of him• self, missing at once both the pathetic paltri- ness and the essential absurdity of the char- acter. Dulcie Gray's effort to suggest the cosy illiteracy of his peasant spouse is on the level of some amiable county matron trying good-naturedly to display the 'com- mon touch' at the servants' party, and it is hard to believe in the kind of relationship she is said to have shared with Gregers's father, played by Norman Wooland as a shambling old rustic got up unaccountably as some Boris Karloff monster. My only pleasure was in Hayley Mills, whose portrait of Hedvig manages to be true and touching in its innocent vulnerability.
Vivian Merchant could probably use a touch of just that quality in her role in the triangular situation of James Joyce's Exiles (closely related to Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken) at the Mermaid. This 1916 piece examines the dilemma of another troubled idealist. a writer. committed to the notion that his wife should enjoy equal freedom with himself in extramarital relationships. Like many a man who has thought to bring a rational mind to bear upon the irrationality of his emotions. he has a hard time 'intellec- tualising' his predicament when the crunch comes, and some of the quiet chats about carnality in terms of meetings of minds are not without their absurd aspects; but the play is both absorbing and engaging. It is lovingly, if somewhat passionlessly, directed by Harold Pinter, and the men—the husband and the would-be lover—are superbly played by John Wood and Timothy West. Miss Merchant's speciality, a smouldering sensual- ity that has been known to make iron men feel as helpless as iron filings when a magnet is passing by, has always seemed to me as transparently calculated as a dropped shoulder-strap, and her calculations are per- haps rather too worldly for this game.
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