Theatre
Easy Virtue (King's Head) Man to Man (Royal Court)
Vocation to amuse
Christopher Edwards
oel Coward's seldom performed Easy Virtue (written in 1924) was a deliber- ate throwback to the well-made drawing- room comedies of Pinero. He claimed it was composed in a spirit of nostalgic regret for a set of conventions, both social and theatrical, that made possible plays like The Second Mrs Tanqueray. Certainly Easy Virtue, as Coward admitted, bore marked resemblances to that work. It too features an emancipated heroine, Larita, whose colourful past shocks a narrow- minded, morally righteous English county set. Maybe Coward's piece can be seen as some sort of 1920s updating of Pinero's classic. I prefer to think of it as another enjoyable bit of propaganda for a brand of sophistication and chic so successfully embodied by the author during his own lifetime — stylistic hallmarks which led the young Tynan, in 1953, to predict that in 50 years' time even the youngest of his gen- eration would know what was meant by 'a very Noel Coward sort of person'.
Silk dressing-gowns and cigarette- holders aside, Coward likes to give us intimations of well-bred, languid grace, money, and a worldly cast of mind — as poised at it is large — that is not easily shocked by what the upper middle class might regard as scandalous. It is an ortho- doxy living off the thrill of a reputation for blasphemy. At any rate Larita needs the stuffy old county lot in order to shine. Coward, always at his best when the smart are gobbling up the dowdy, obliges by cleverly lining up a set of stereotypes for her to demolish. The spectacle, one-sided though it may be, is worth relishing. Larita — a 'mature' woman — arrives at the well-heeled Whittaker household as the new as yet uninspected, wife of their decent, sporty young son John (excellently played by John Michie). The couple met over the gambling tables at Cannes, and some of the family suspect Larita of fortune-hunting. John's mother — a fine comic study in nervy disapproval by Avril Angers — cannot wait for confirmation of her prejudice that Larita must be too old, too worldly and too wicked for her son. In the first act Larita causes a stir by revealing
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that she is a divorcee. In the second it emerges that she was implicated in a scandalous court case involving a former lover who committed suicide. By the third act Larita can stand it no more and takes revenge on the bigoted crew by materialis- ing at the family dance in a startlingly low-cut dress wearing all her jewellery. If these provincials want a scandal to set the neighbours' tongues wagging, she will give them one, with knobs on. Pausing only to hand John over to the safe-keeping of his wholesome former sweetheart Sarah, Lari- ta makes a stylish exit, bound for Paris.
Jane How makes the most of the part of Larita. Whether lounging, bored stiff, on the Whittakers' chintz sofa, wearing a crimson silk trouser suit and fur coat and reading Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah while everyone else engages in healthy outdoor sports, or stirring up and swatting the hornets' nest of Whittaker prejudice at the end of Act Two, she manages to behave like a creature that has dropped in from another world. I would guess she is just what the author would have wished for, a triumph of high style over leaden circumstance. Even when mildly fazed by all the fuss, a cigarette from the Lacloche case restores her equilibrium. The rest of the family provide her with perfect foils, notably Miranda Kingsley who plays John's hearty prig of a sister, Marion, with sublimely comic clumsiness.
The theatre is tiny. Tim Luscombe's cast is huge — 19 characters, many of them very minor but each one individually play- ed, with not a weak performance any- where. The set and costumes are stylish and expensive. It is as if producer and director were confident of making the West End transfer this production could certainly sustain. My only doubts concern Coward's rather hollow hints that his ele- gant, declassee, witty, straight-talking heroine might represent some sort of genuine moral perspective. The cards are stacked too heavily against the caricatured opposition to take that seriously. Anyway, Coward's true vocation is to amuse, and that he does very successfully. As T. S. Eliot once asked, why should anyone suppose that Coward ever spent any time in the study of ethics? His cleverness and his talent lay in finding out how his audiences would like to behave and en- couraging them, by exhibiting personages behaving in that way. Much of his public life was spent triumphantly giving the world examples of this kind of encourage- ment. The character of Larita, and this excellent revival, provide us with others.
Manfred Karge's one-woman play, Man to Man, features the remarkable young actress Tilda Swinton. The author is Ger- man, out of the Brechtian school. The play, which covers a period from the end of the Weimar Republic to the beginning of the German economic miracle, presents the character of Ella Gericke, who takes over her dead husband's job as a crane operator by disguising herself as a man. The piece is a study in dislocation, as Ella tries — and essentially fails — to come to terms with a society based on beer, music and machismo. The idea of a translated play dealing with the alienated German proletariat may deter some people. In fact the author eschews any obvious Brechtian social analysis and much of both our and Ella's search for meaning is frustrated. But as Karge leaves us, for much of the evening, up in the air over what precisely the actions in front of us signify, this may not seem much compensation.
What distinguishes the production is the performance of Tilda Swinton as the strange, sexless old crone with a peeling face, huge boots and a sock stuffed down a pair of man's Y-fronts. She succeeds, in the face of some consciously inhospitable material, in forcing us to watch and admire her art, as Ella wanders uncomprehending- ly through 25 years of German history.
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