Theatre
Strictly for the Bees
By BAMBER GASCOIGNE
Period of Adjustment. (Royal Court.)—War and Peace. (Old Vic.) The theme of the Tennessee Williams comedy is the marital turmoil of two couples. One of the marriages is one night old, the other several years, but both sets of problems arc covered by the same excuse, 'period of adjustment.' There is no reason why this material need seem slender, but Tennessee Williams chooses to treat it superficially, even patronisingly, by milking (Continued on page 826) the situation for laughs; and, more important, he chooses to set the crises of both marriages in the past. By the time the curtain goes up each couple is already estranged. We can only hear about the disastrous bridal beginnings of the Haversticks last night and the row which, this very morning, sent Dorothea Bates storming out of her dinky Spanish-stucco suburban house, built, symbolically, above a huge subterranean cavern. Tennessee Williams has become in- creasingly fond of this type of retrospective play-making; Suddenly Last Summer was little more than a narration of two spectacular events in the past. The danger of the technique is that the plays seem static.
Period of Adjustment marks time very daintily for two and a half long acts, dancing round the embarrassment and misery of the vir- ginal Haversticks while the older husband, Ralph Bates, does his best to steer them towards consummation. In the third act Mrs. Bates comes back and both couples at last prepare for bed. 'When a marriage goes on the rocks, the rocks are there, right there,' said Big Mama in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, pointing at a double bed, and the big lie-down at the end of Period of Adjustment seems designed to confirm this naïve over-simplification. It appears, in other words, to be a quite unwarranted sentimental ending. Tennessee Williams presumably doesn't mean it this way, since in the early stages of love-play the house gives a great lurch and several more cracks appear in it as it sinks a little further into the cavern; equally the ludicrous fuss about which wife shall wear which frilly nightgown must be intended as satirical. But I suspect that audiences, who tend to wish frills and happiness on every conceivable candi- date, may well take it all straight.
The play is saved by Williams's most reliable talent: he can write superb lines for actors. The part of the young wife is the best of all, catch- ing superbly the vacuity of her coy feminine conversation, and it coaxes a brilliant perfor- mance out of Collin Wilcox, an American actress who is new to London. Almost equally well written is the phoney virile bonhomie of the two husbands, who were buddies in the Korean war and who are now happiest reminiscing about their largely imaginary sexual exploits in the brothels of Tokyo. These two also are very well played by Bernard Braden and Neil McCallum, and with some lengthy cuts the act- ing and the pleasure of individual lines would certainly redeem the rather flimsy whole.
In technical terms War and Peace has been brilliantly adapted—by, among others, Erwin Piscator, ..the most famous director of epic and didactic theatre in the Twenties. A very well- written commentary, spoken with suave and powerful sincerity by John Franklyn Robbins in white tie and tails, tells the story, links the scenes and draws the moral. Mr. Robbins wan- ders like a guide at Mme Tussaud's among the actors in their Napoleonic costumes and some- times hands over to them in mid-sentence. For example; Mr. Robbins, The Countess Rostova was always talking about . . The Countess Rostova, to her daughter, 'Money, money, money.' This was Dylan Thomas's technique in Under Milk Wood and it 13 almost invariably effective. As an extension of the same method people in quite different scenes can suddenly talk to each other; or Napoleon, standing on a pinnacle, can pass a comment on a Russian domestic squabble on the stage below him or can argue a point with Mr. Robbins. In addition there are frequent maps and a re-enactment of the Battle of Boro- dino with toy soldiers. As an object lesson in the brisk communication of facts and ideas this pro- duction could hardly be bettered.
The obvious danger in all these delights of theatricalism and ingenuity is that the central characters, as people, will be swamped—and I personally found that this happened. When Brecht singled out the scenes which were to be the individual links in the chain of an epic narra- tive, he gave each one a striking dramatic con- tent or form. Too many of the personal scenes in this War and Peace are shapeless meetings or departures—we could just as easily be told about them by Mr. Robbins. The one superb excep- tion is the entrancing scene where old Prince Bolkonski scornfully examines Natasha on his favourite subject, mathematics, Only to discover that she knows far more than he. Elizabeth Shepherd makes a delightful Natasha and Derek Smith is very convincing as Pierre. The character of Andrei suffers rather at the hands of the plot —he frequently journeys to and fro from the war or from foreign countries, and when these travels are compressed into three hours they almost reduce him to the status of a St. Petersburg commuter. However, Paul Eddington plays him 'well and Peter O'Shaughnessy is excellent as his impossibly eccentric old father. Altogether this production, in spite of its almost inevitable weak- nesses, was very well worth doing. It has come from the Bristol Old Vic; and, judging by the Old Vic's own recent record, the parent might well make rather more use of the offspring's talents.
Previous page
