Theatre
All's Well That Ends Well
By ALAN BRIEN All's Well That Ends Well. (Stratford - upon - Avon.) Dark Halo. (Arts.) Ar Stratford-upon-Avon this week there was a revival of a quaint old piece called All's Well That Ends Well. It was knocked together some 350 years ago by a hack actor who never even became a knight. Indeed, I'm told he could hardly write his own name. Most of my readers, fortunately for them, will be familiar with his work only as improved upon by some of those myriad-minded directors who are the glory of this present age. There was a time when men of the theatre who were bored with his long speeches, bemused by his involved language, irritated by his dragging plots, outraged by his reactionary views, rocked to sleep by his whiskery jokes, would rewrite a play of his and proudly put their own name on the title page. But life today is too short to do a Dryden on such badly proof-read texts. Instead we have Mr. Tyrone Guthrie, himself the author of such masterpieces as Kiss Me Cressida, Pullup for Carmen, A Touch of Larry in the Night and The Three Wee Estates (this last in Serbo-Croat). Anybody who has missed All's Well because he thought it would be Shakespearean can happily begin to queue immediately. Mr. Guthrie has miraculously rejigged this old-fashioned prodigy of tedium into a rollicking farce which must instantly appeal to all fans of the Crazy Gang, all connoisseurs of ENSA concert parties, all aficionados of the Army Game: in short, all those who believe that the British theatre has been too long dominated by mere word-spinners and is sadly in need of a few grotesques who know how to parrot a comic accent, execute a lively pratfall, and bump into each other every time they limp across the stage.
Mr. Guthrie begins by setting the play in another age from the original—or rather several other ages. The court of the King of France becomes the Kaiser's Germany. The Tuscan battle- field outside the walls of Florence is transformed into the Western Desert of 1941. The French nobles are all spruced and frogged and helmeted like Ouida guardsmen. Parolles is a 1930 sports- car cad with a thin moustache, light brown shoes, a yellow muffler and a trilby hat (though later he affects the orange tights and gold braid of an Ivor Novello aide-de-camp). Mr. Guthrie has understood the basic law of show business—keep 'em guessing. It doesn't matter what you do as long as it is different from what you did for. He takes the same freedom with the characters as he does with the settings. Diana is described in the text—even in Mr. Guthrie's text—as 'a young gentlewoman of most chaste renown.' Therefore she must be played as a wartime factory tart who sits on the doorstep in nightgown and housecoat, with a turban on her head and a lollipop in her mouth, giggling the lines in coffee-bar Cockney. Her mother is an old bag of tricks from a Giles cartoon swathed in a purple knitted dress, strangled in Woolworth beads, and choking over her nightcap of gin. As much as possible of the evening—which lasts three and a half hours—must be taken up with elaborate, wordless business. The moment is everything—the easy laugh, the unexpected effect, the involved dance—while the total, poetic impact of the play is nothing. Consider just one scene for a taste of the Guthrie genius. It is only a few lines in Shake- speare and eminently forgettable. The Duke of Florence is greeting the French lords who are to fight for him. Mr. Guthrie manages to make this an enormous show-piece, fit centre for any Sunday night spectacular at the Palladium. The comic soldiers in baggy shorts, black socks and berets are lined up under a blazing sky by the side of a ruined desert viaduct. The Duke of Florence, a goateed parody of General Smuts, dodders along the line with his officers falling over him every time he halts to peer at a myster- ious medal. When he turns suddenly his sword becomes entangled between the legs of his staff officer. When he tries to make a speech from the top of an observation tower, the microphone gets a fit of metallic coughing. When he attempts to salute the flag, it slides slowly down the post again. Meanwhile every man on the stage is improvising some ludicrous prank such as few amateur entertainers at a Stag Night at the Ser- geants' Mess could hope to equal.
All's Well is not one of my favourite plays. It has an aristocratic lout for a hero, a cold-blooded man-hunter for a heroine, an apoplectic dictator for a deus ex machina, and some rather indifferent poetry. But a mediocre play does not become more bearable by transforming it into a bad pantomime. Mr. Guthrie's hero is deprived of even those .rags of snotty grandeur in which Shakespeare dressed him. Played by Edward de Souza, he is just a stuffy, dirty-minded school- boy. (Because Shakespeare describes 'his arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls,' Mr. de Souza was naturally chosen for his flat face, stolid eyes and cropped hair.) Zoe Caldwell is still an ambu- lating doormat of a maiden—and often she speaks the verse with the well-elocuted precision of a schoolgirl making a presentation in a foreign language. Edith Evans is Edith Evans—an exiled queen locked away in a madhouse who still bestows her autumnal wisdom on the deaf zanies around her. Mr. Guthrie has even hit upon some brilliant and enlightening strokes of direction— Helena hypnotising the King with her rhythmic verse while she strokes away his pain, for example. The last act has some groupings which are stag- geringly effective. Many of the cast—notably Anthony Ni'cholls, Robert Hardy, Angela Bad- deley and Priscilla Morgan—stuff their hollow roles with life and spirit. But the play itself re- mains a ragbag of revue sketches linked by a thin and improbable plot.
In some ways Sylvia Leigh's Dark !Ala is more traditionally lbsenish than Ibsen's own Brand at Hammersmith. Her Brands are plucked from the burning by the simple revelation that their prophet is also a profiteer. It is 'Mother's' humanity which eventually disillusions and disperses her spiritual children. Ibsen's Brand is transfigured by the discovery of his own weaknesses. A failed father- figure, he goes under gladly, swallowed up in the thaw of a ventriloquial snowball which proclaims `God is Love.' Both plays have fat parts for the leading player. Both have been enthusiastically received. It now seems a hundred year since critics groused that the theatre refused to discuss the three occupational neuroses of the Admass Man Religion and Politics. Despite occasional colourful dabs of Freudian psychology, Miss Leigh's draughtsmanship is that of the old- fashioned thick-nibbed black-and-white car- toonist. Her dupes' are insecure, half-educated lower-middle-class Americans searching for a mirror to prove to themselves they exist. They are victims of a commercial materialistic society. All arc scarred in some way—by loneliness, by failure, by illness, by pigmentation. And in the mirror, they want to see reflected an intangible world where etheric bodies are more real than fleshy ones, where disease and poverty can be imagined away, where day dreams come true. Their spiritual leader is crippled by the same fears—though she is at least a dwarf among pigmies. Miss Leigh's dramatic analysis of this mutual hypnotism is crude but convincing.
The disciples are well snapped with a superficial candid-camera eye. There is Harry Towb, the sharp salesman who has lost his cutting edge; Tucker McGuire, the eternal spinster stool- pigeon; Tony Calvin, a sinisterly ingratiating, lecherously filial, teenager with paralysed vocal cords; Michael Segal, the frustrated author with too much diligence for too little talent. They are asked to do little more than decorate and elaborate their lines with a few believable tics and manner- isms. The action of the plot is carried forward through only three of the supporting characters. Betty McDowall, a widowed mother still clinging to her own umbilical string, donates her dying child as the new religion's first martyr. Miss McDowall is forced to play on one continuing note of bewildered hysteria but her wail grows hor- ribly like an air-raid siren and then sobs off into an uneasy, impressive silence. It is across this corpse that the tug-of-war develops. On one side Sheila Burrell's cynical, literal-minded, Broadway bit player ; on the other Edgar Wreford, her owlish fiancé who is 'Mother's' woolliest disciple. Both dig in their heels and strain away realistically—but I could never believe that they would ever have joined lips originally.
This is a weakness of the whole play. The gullible worshippers exist individually—but their reactions to each other, and to 'Mother,' are con- ditioned by the pressure of the plot rather than by steam-power of their own temperaments. Until the end of the second act, the basic pup- petry of the people is unimportant. And the act ends with a convulsively well-directed paroxysm of mass hysteria as the sect rock and roll in frenzied prayer for the dying girl. Unfortunately, Miss Leigh sacrifices her drama here for a coup de theatre. In the moment of their frantic triumph, when the Holy Ghost seems to be pass- ing through the room, the child dies. The narra- tive tension snaps and can never be wound up again in the final act. I believe that Ibsen would have allowed the child to recover—thus ensuring that 'Mother' should be at the very peak of her imaginary powers just before her downfall. Instead, the discovery of her petty embezzlement comes as an anti-climax and the desertion of the disciples is merely a perfunctory unravelling of the plot like the detective's explanation at the end of an Agatha Christie thriller. Ibsen, too, would have emphasised that the do-it-yourself home-religion racket was a microcosm of free- enterprise society. Miss Leigh's final message is the conventional one—from now on 'Mother's' followers have learned `to be independent of all other people.' Surely the lesson of modern life is that independence is impossible and that it is this very fear of co-existence which drives the weak and the neurotic into the make-believe of cosy religiosity?
Still, Dark Halo is a play which is about a human activity which really exists out there beyond the scenery. 'Mother' is never just a vam- pire hypocrite. Both in the dialogue and in Mary Ellis's acting the unconscious drives which force her to deceive herself are continually hinted at. Miss Ellis seems oddly uncertain of the exact figure she wants to cut and I doubt whether this is due to any particular subtlety of writing, play- ing or direction. Yet she does remain in the corner of the mind's eye as a sort of palpable shadow, like a spirit photograph mixing up ectoplasm and muslin. Her accent slides around somewhere in mid-Atlantic. Her matronly sweet- ness seems always on the verge of tears and swearing. Her crumpled despair covers a secret masochistic exultation. It is almost as if she had materialised on the stage from Beyond and was hoping that no one would notice that she was transparent in a strong light.
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