Theatre
Doctor Knock (Orange Tree, Richmond) What a Performance (Queens) Moscow Stations (Garrick)
Knock at the door
Sheridan Morley
Time and again over these last 20 years it has been Sam Walters out at the Orange Tree in Richmond who has rediscovered lost classics which appear to have missed the attention of entire literary departments at the major subsidised companies, and now he has another. Doctor Knock was written by Jules Romains in 1923 and became a fixture of regional and touring theatre in this country up to the last war, whereupon it vanished almost totally.
In France, it had been the making of its original star, Louis Jouvet, who went on playing the charismatic Doctor for 30 years, financing virtually all his other stage pro- jects with revivals: the mystery is why it should since have been so ignored on both sides of the Channel, given that it seems to me on this first viewing the funniest play about medical quackery since Moliere's Le Malade Imaginaire.
The plot is simple enough: into a com- munity of happy, reasonably healthy towns- folk somewhere in pastoral France erupts the strangely sinister Knock: he buys a medical practice, and within days convinces the entire community that they are suffer- ing from a multitude of bizarre ailments which he alone can cure and indeed spell. But the satire is not just on small-town gullibility: like Chaplin's Dictator, Knock is a terrifying glimpse of pre-war fascism in Europe and the ease with which apparently intelligent and caring people could be made to abandon all their beliefs simply by a travelling charlatan with the gift of the gab. In America, Knock would have been Elmer Gantry: in France he's the man with the magic potions, eagerly occupying a kingdom where at 10 every morning he can see out across 200 homes, in each of which there is someone already taking their tem- perature for the second time. Geoffre.}. Beevers perfectly captures this Knock al the doors.
The crucial importance of Sid Field, and it is one which seems to have eluded most of my critical colleagues intent on remark- ing that his vaudeville routines (as recap- tured ably enough by David Suchet in What A Performance at the Queens) no longer seem all that funny, is not what he was but what he built. He built a bridge between the old stand-up comics of the Max Miller generation before him to the comic actors who were then able to follow him. Without Field, there would have been no Tony Hancock, no Ronnie Barker, maybe even no Kenneth Williams. Field, and Field alone, showed that it was possible to play characters in sketches rather than varia- tions on the old stand-up gags.
That was why he was loved by Olivier and Tynan and Danny Kaye: because they recognised that here, as in George Robey, lay a great theatrical talent rather than just another music-hall joker. Field's life and work were short-lived: corrupt and ineffi- cient career management meant that he did not reach London from the provinces until 1943, and by 1950 he was dead of a heart attack at only 45. By then he had already made the crossover to Harvey, but his few films were disastrous and there is almost nothing left now save a few crack- ling radio broadcasts.
Out of those, and a biography or two, William Humble has pieced together a bio- drama of considerable dexterity, through which Suchet careers with superb physical energy, dragging old sketches back to some sort of afterlife and narrating along the way the story of a quirky genius so terrified of his mother that he never told her he was married until his wife gave birth to their first child. As with all the recent concert- celebration singalongs, the problems here arise on the borderline between critical study and fan-worship: What A Performance goes for a bit of both, amiably enough.
Already widely acclaimed at the Edin- burgh Festival, Tom Courtenay now comes to the Garrick with Moscow Stations, the solo show that has brought him back to the very height of his considerable form. Based on an autobiographical novel by Venedikt Yerofeev, these notes from the under- ground are the rambling and random mem- oirs of a lifelong drunk permanently high or rather low on a lethal mix of beer, paintstripper, lilac perfume and sock deodoriser, presumably shaken but not stirred.
We are, however: Courtenay's mesmeric, despairing tramp, touring the railway sta- tions of outer Moscow in search of his own lost soul and sometimes even that of his Brezhnev-era nation, is bleakly brilliant and often almost unbearably touching in its gently lyrical defeat.
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