Theatre
Words Made Flesh
By ALAN BRIEN Bloomsday. (Unity.)—A Pas- sage to India. (Oxford Play- khouse.) IT is an admirable discipline for a critic to find himself flattened nose to nose occa- sionally against a masterpiece from another art. Last week I attended the press show at the Academy Cinema of part two of Eisenstein'.; unfinished trilogy about Ivan the Terrible—The Boyars' Plot. Here suddenly, I realise, is a dramatic work created only thirteen years ago which shrinks all our post-war flesh-and-blood theatre to the size of pigmy waxworks. Here is a writer-director who stamps his burning images on the retina like a mediaeval executioner, who seizes the grammar of his medium and forces it to bend and buckle and strain but never to break under the passion of his individuality, who creates his own world through his own eyes with the perverse majesty of a Shakespeare.
As always at the cinema, even with the measliest film, I was struck immediately by the variety and realism of the visual patterns. But this pictorial intoxication rarely lasts after the first few minutes. Soon the mind begins to rumble and protest with hunger pains--it begins to cry out for ideas, opinions, attitudes, comments, explana- tions, arguments. The theatre is the word made flesh. The cinema is the newest and most complex of narrative techniques, but its appeal is still to the earliest and least mature of the senses, the eye. Almost every film is desiccated for lack of language—look, for example, at Tony Richard- son's film version of Look Back In Anger. Here were views of modern Britain captured with a rare freshness and precision. Here Richardson took that most hackneyed of all screen locations, a railway station, invested it with all the beauty and drama and sordidness of a French quayside or wild West township. But Osborne's characters became on celluloid only half-men, robbed of the eloquence of their clacking tongues. They were transformed into neurotics who talked too much and yet said too little. Eisenstein is successful because he accepts the reticent tradition of the silent cinema. He uses only the simple, bold rhetoric of the epic poem, admirably translated into English captions by Ivor Montagu. Instead
he conveys his action and his attitude through the mannered, maniac, unforgettable swivellings of his unique eye. Unlike almost every other director, Eisenstein never tries to pretend that his camera does not exist. You'have to see the savage claustrophobic world of Ivan his way—the dusty cavernous stone igloos of the Muscovite princes, the polished chessboard court of the King of Poland, the forest of black candles smoking and flickering by the open coffins, Ivan himself with his addled oval egg-head and his dagger beard sleepwalking like some evil Messiah beneath the starved Christ ikons of the cathedral, the be- jewelled grubby hands on the white ermine couch, the courtiers shaggy as bears in their fuzzy cloaks or flat as shadows in their black klansmen's hoods and gowns. The Boyars' Plot is a Shakespearian chronicle play with the poetry taken out of their characters' mouths and put into their faces.
Just as the realistic film de-languages the play, so the realistic play must de-language the novel. Two great novels at the moment are on stage in dramatic versions and both of them inevitably lose much of the depth and richness of their originals. But both are also moving and impressive theatre. Bloomsday must be, in every sense of the phrase, a word-play. Allan McClelland has kept something of almost every episode in Ulysses— except for the Circe section which has already been staged as Ulysses in Nighttown. It would be difficult to imagine a better introduction and appetiser to the book. Some of the minor charac- ters are hamstrung by their accents and thrash around like men trying to run with bootlaces tied together. And Mr. McClelland, who also directs, sometimes fails to emphasise sufficiently the sub- jectivity of much of the dialogue—particularly, as at the funeral, where Bloom's thoughts should in effect be appearing to leave his body and move invisibly around the others. More imaginative use of lighting and greater depth of staging would have helped here.
But producing Joyce is a much more ambitious 'task than producing Shakespeare, and we should be grateful to Mr. McClelland for his brilliant realisation of the Iwo main characters. Denys Hawthorn's Stephen Daedelus is no longer the tiresome orphan Hamlet of Burgess Meredith's production—he has a negligent, ironic charm which is very endearing and which makes his out- bursts of gloomy guilt extraordinarily effective. Joe MacColum's Bloom .neither replaces nor is overshadowed by Zero IS.lostel's performance. Both in fact are complementary. Mr. Mostel was the fat, jovial, ridiculous balloon man who was packed under pressure inside the ingratiating, haunted Jewish advertisement salesman. Mr. MacColum is a sad, tiny, persecuted refugee from a thousand spiritual pogroms, crucified each day on a dirty joke. Occasionally, in a quiet, almost imperceptible way, he is extremely funny. Always, he is extremely moving. I only wish that the Unity Theatre did not seem so obsessed with its responsi- bilities as an outlet for agit-prop that it should feel obliged to apologise in the programme for presenting a bourgeois formalist like Joyce.
'Not one of my favourite books,' whispered E. M. Forster to a friend at the first night of A Passage to India. I cannot say it is one of mine, though I pay it respectful, slightly baffled, admira- tion. Neither in print nor in the theatre have I completely comprehended that mystic message about the identity of good and evil. There is a sense in which his revelation that all of us take part in every good and bad action is profoundly true—but it is the sort of profound truth which is ultimately paralysing. The human theme, as distinct from the abstract theme, of the book and the play remains timely and timeless. It is the ageless antagonism between those who want to he loved and those who want to be respected—the dilemma of all Empires.
The plot of the book, and of Miss Santha Rama Rau's adaptation, is much more direct than most of Forster's. The tragedy that lurks at the end of a string of harmless incidents is much more pre- dictable in British India of the Twenties than in middle-class Edwardian England. At Dr. Aziz's first appearance at the European tea party, as he frisks around like a spaniel puppy, begging to be caressed, fearing to be reproved, pleading to be useful, while the whites sit stolidly like grown-ups at a children's party, half-amused and half- embarrassed, we know that this comical interlude will end by pulling down the roof on all their ideals and ambitions. Forster's power as a Delphic moralist, and the play's superiority as a moral
drama, lies in the ability to display black and white as shades of grey. The boyish Indian doctor is also a sensualist. The intelligent and noble Miss Adela is also a frustrated hysteric. The wise old motherly Mrs. Moore is also a weary human being whose beliefs are a veneer over a gaping, empty, selfish cynicism. All these three are given almost perfect performances: Zia Mohyeddin is hand- some, shifty, funny, tragic, irritating—Dr. Aziz to the life. Dilys Hamlett's Adela, like PeggY Ashcroft's Rebecca, manages to hint continually at all the sides of her character which will gradu- ally be revealed without ever once over-playing- and that scraped bone china face of a young Garbo is hauntingly attractive. Enid Lorimer's Mrs. Moore, suburban matriarch, disintegrates under shock after the mysterious incident in the Malabar Caves in a way which is painful but marvellous to see. The second and third acts lack the clarity and precision of the riveting opening. Some of the minor parts are depressingly obvi- ously acted and dressed. But A Passage to India remains a great achievement for the director, Frank Hauser, and London should not be de- prived of a revamped version of it soon.
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