THEATRE
Mr Brook's Lemon
By HILARY SPURL NG
Lsr week London made its first major excur- sion into the much heralded documentary theatre. U S is an attempt at a new form of motley experience, involving considerable re- search, lavish resources, novel techniques, un- limited personal dedication, and the answer is a lemon.
A coarse answer is the only possible one to this abysmal spectacle, in which the crudity of acting and presentation reflects the cheap, facile ambivalence of the company's attitude to the problems of the war in Vietnam. In so far as the t. how deals with the war at all, it can only have brutalising and dehumanising effect. Pity and fear are here represented by the company roaring
fit to burst and rampaging round the stage, in a pretend air-raid like the fag-end of a children's party; American hypocrisy is demonstrated by an army sergeant making grotesquely winsome babytalk to imaginary children burnt by Ameri- can napalm; journalistic propaganda exposed by a mooching crooner in a black leather jacket, glib and oily as only a crooner can be, whose endlessly repeated lyric begins 'I was run over by the Truth one day,' and ends, on anything from a whine to a bellowing sob of self-pity: `Tell me li-i-ies about Vietnam.' If anything could overlay and deaden our reactions to the problems involved in this war, it would be the callous senti- mentality of the Aldwych show—callous because the company's hysterical clowning, self-righteous belligerence and mawkish attempts at solemnity are a hopelessly inadequate response to the actual suffering they attempt to portray.
It is also a dishonest response. These victims of air-raids and napalm, the Buddhist monks self- immolated, the American generals bulging with evil war-lust, are not presented for their own sakes, certainly not in the atmosphere of balanced comment hopefully conjured in a programme note. They are counters in a private attack on the audience, an attack for which the Vietnam war is no more than a convenient, and blatantly exploited, pretext. Reactions to the war itself should not be confused with reactions to the strident, insensitive bullying which is this com- pany's prevailing mood; and which reaches a
climax when the actors—supposed victims of some war horror—put their heads inside paper bags, clamber down over the front of the stage and grope their way, some on all fours, some pawing at the audience, all baa-ing like sheep, Up the aisles towards the exits. This happens at the interval—and the only human reaction to these bleating jokers would be to snatch the bags off their heads and make for the bar. But by this time the audience was beyond even dumb inso- lence; so numbed and cowed and bludgeoned that it remained glued as one man to its seats. Peter Brook's belief—that the theatre 'has one precise social function, to disturb the spec- tator'—is well known; and no one in his senses
would deny that U S is an excruciating experi-
ence. But Mr Brooks deceives himself if he thinks our discomfort is connected in any way what- ever with the war in Vietnam. 'I'm Marjie Law-
rence,' says one actress, coming forward after the interval to tell us what a jolly good time has been had by all working on this show, 'and if it keeps us happy, that's all that should matter to you.' This mock-humble arrogance, diagnosed by Max Beerbohm as the root cause of the invariable badness of amateur acting, underlies the whole affair, and in part explains the incredibly feckless production standards. But there is a distinction: amateurs in general inflict themselves only on friends and relations; the Aldwych company evidently derives very considerable pleasure from the palpable misery they inflict on an anonymous section of the public.
And here we come to the root of the matter: if the first half of the show deals ostensibly with the war in Vietnam, the second half is a dialogue, or straight talk, in which the actors, still in their street clothes, stop messing about with guns and bombs and thinly veiled indictments, and come to their own—`our own'—dilemma. The impli- cations of shallowness and dishonesty in the first half are made explicit in the second. 'Vietnam' falls into place, as one among a whole set of current OK catchphrases—Cuba, LSD, homo- sexuality, plight of women, etc.—bandied about to signify a supposed contemporary malaise. Glenda Jackson, with whom the audience is tacitly requested to identify as a step towards total theatre, comes forward with a sad little tale about a 'typical' couple—leftish, progressive, quasi-intellectual—who set up house in the morn- ing of life, eating pasta, drinking cheap wine and listening to Mahler; time passes and this couple is snared into a conventional marriage, acquires babies and a mini and other affluent trappings, listens less and less to Mahler; finally, Miss Jackson rises to a prolonged shriek of betrayal and accusation, screaming that she would like to see English babies burnt by napalm, bombs dropped on English households among the Sun- day roasts. It is a pitiful and profoundly embar- rassing confession. 'Listening to Mahler' i.e., highbrow cultural activity, becomes a cheap slogan on the level of an advertising catchphrase, a protective device doing duty for any kind of intellectual or emotional effort; in much the same way as `Vietnam,—Cuba' and the rest stand in for problems of social conscience. Thinking on this trite level inevitably leads to a sense of inadequacy. The mistake is to pretend that this inadequacy is in any way new or specifically of 1966: these are the old traditional bourgeois compromises, the same, under a thin disguise, that Jarry attacked in 1896. The Aldwych show is disturbing, not because of the subject selected as a peg, but because of the picture the company pre- sent of themselves, of what they choose to call `our own generation': shifty, soft-centred, shallow, self-pitying and self-righteous, above all resentful, as the bourgeoisie always is when con- fronted with its own self-imposed limitations. The company carries a heavy load of spite to be un- burdened on the audience.
Over the past year or so, we have come to expect this kind of gratuitous punishment from the non-commercial or 'dedicated' arm of the theatre—though never anything quite so shiftless, hypocritical and monstrously trivial as the present production. There was a time when we looked to this arm to jack up the slipping standards of the commercial theatre; and, though that time is past, it should perhaps be said that greed for money, even supposing that to be the prime motive of most commercial managements, is less repulsive than abject exhibitionism.
Particularly in a week when the West End proper has produced two outstandingly brisk productions: Lady Windermere's Fan is a delight, and not simply for the pleasures, though these can hardly be overstated. of seeing Coral Browne as the Scarlet Lady, NN ilfrid Hyde White as her ineffably complaisant dupe, and Isabel Jeans as the Duchess of Berwick, past mistress in the exquisitely refined art of the bully. Also fcr sheer pleasure in the play itself. Anthony Quayle's production and Cecil Beaton's designs—dingy silk dresses, bulging with puffs and pads in all the colours of a fleshy, well-ripened bruise— strike precisely the note of Wilde's glamorous, worldly, tarnished and materialistic society. Mr Beaton rises to the heights w ith his smoking-room, a dim cave of fretwork recesses, padded leather and art-nouveau tulips, shot with the occasional gaudy gleam of stained glass—fit setting for that liverish, all-male session after the clubs have closed, heavy with stale tobacco, smutty jokes and, behind each curtain, the palpitating presence of an unseen, eavesdropping lady. Who could object to a few loose ends in such a jewelled succession of scenes? Neil Simon's The Odd Couple is another production to be relished for sheer pleasure in the artefact. Mr Simon is a master of dialogue, one of the very few among living playwrights, a master also of the even rarer, indeed almost vanished, skills of purely dramatic technique: above all, the knack of squeezing every last drop of juice from an essentially simple situation. All opportunities superbly taken by Victor Spinetti, Jack Klugman and excellent supporting cast.
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