Call me responsible
Kenneth Hurren
A Bit Between the Teeth by Michael Pertwee (Cambridge Theatre) Sammy Cahn's Songbook (New London Theatre) The Trip to Florence by Peter Terson (Shaw Theatre)
I had the airline tickets already and I might well have gone on holiday last week; looking at the list above
of the items that lay in wait for reviewers, you will plainly wonder
why I didn't. The truth is that I could not bring myself to disappoint Michael Pertwee. In his case, it seems to me I have a special responsibility. Pertwee, known in some circles as the housewives' choice (he has recently, I understand, been infesting a wireless show called Woman's Hour) and in others as 'the celebrated playwrite' (vide programme notes at the Royalty Theatre), has come pretty well to rely on me as a guide to the box-office potential of his works. If I find them so excruciatingly witless that any auditors of sensibility, unless actually chained to their seats, are likely to be found scratching pitifully at the exit doors within ten or fifteen minutes of curtain-up, it is practically money in the bank to Pertwee: the surest indication he can get that he has written another winner.
Let me, then, without further ado, offer the good news about A Bit Between the Teeth: it's terrible, arguably the worst Pertwee has ever done. It's true that some of the gilt must inevitably fall from this gingerbread for him by the necessity of sharing the credit — for the play, I see, is "based on an idea by Brian Rix" — but Rix's cut cannot legitimately be excessive, since nothing identifiable as an idea is revealed by the most minute scrutiny of the exhibit, at least by the naked eye. Conceivably Rix's idea was merely that he should be in it, he being as unlikely an actor as might be found, with the possible exception of a Scottish comedian named Jimmy Logan, for the part of a jeweller. There are two jewellers here: Rix plays one, Logan the other. They are involved with two young women who are as indistinguishable as mice, except that they have different coloured underwear. There is also a policeman, concerned about some missing diamonds and singularly obtuse even for the genre of farce which, by the way, this is supposed to be. It is an unremittingly ghastly entertainment, relieved for me only by my happiness for Michael Pertwee.
I am happy for Sammy Cahn, too, though not, perhaps, as happy as he is for himself. He is an ageing American songwriter, whose show — in whiCh he has the assistance of three singers and a pianist — obliges me to the astounding and not wholly creditable realisation
that I have more of Cahn's words fixed in my head than I have of Shakespeare's. The slush of which popular songs used to be made has poured from him prodigally ('Please Be Kind,—I've Heard That Song Before,' Rhythm is Our Business,' 'Come Fly With Me,' My Kind of Town,' Call Me Irresponsible,' ete, etc), for decades, and he has had the enviable knack of being able to arrange them into the sort of rhymes and phrases that are effortlessly memorable. As well as singing a lot of them himself (he sings, in Ethel Merman's phrase, "like a mink"), he fills out his show with enlightening reminiscences of how his songs came to be written; and while he doesn't actually denigrate the contributions of the composers with whom he has worked, the impression conveyed is that men like Jimmy van Heusen and Jule Styne were pretty lucky to have him around to put them on the right lines when they were writing the tunes that went with his lyrics for; respectively in the cases of those two, The Tender Trap' and 'Three Coins in the Fountain.'
In his new play for the National Youth Theatre, Peter Terson turns from his exploration of the problems of working-class youth to discuss public school chaps, and the system underlying their attitudes, on a summer tour of Florence. His dramatic thread tends to get rather lost among his sociological prejudices, and even those who share them may find their aftention less than riveted.
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