THEATRE
Old Laing signs
KENNETH HURREN
The piece has to do with' a middle-aged man named James Blanch, regarded by society as a species of nut, who is pleading before a tribunal for his release from a men- tal institution. Mr Carman's apparent purpose is to show, with arctic cynicism, that the members of the board convened to hear Blanch's case are more plausible candidates for the bin than he is, all of them being for more dangerous odd-balls if only because of their official positions; and he devotes himself to this proposition with the naïve fervour of a schoolboy who has just stumbled on Swift, Laing and Joe Orton and is bugged by the discovery that the world is divided into the sane and the insane and that the sane decide which is which. Cardboard representatives of the Law, Medicine and the Church are set up for the buckshot, iden- tified as emotional cripples on evidence rang- ing from impotence and frustration to the fact that they are keen on cars and dogs, and duly shot down.
Meanwhile Blanch himself is tenderly handled as no more than a rebellious ec- centric, though it may be that Mr Cannan would like us to regard him also as a challengingly original thinker, despite having spent much of his life in journalism and advertising. If he is hard to live with and a faithless husband (there is a footless roman- tic interlude with an opera singer occupying, in flashback, most of the middle act), it is simply an inevitable consequence of his wife's indifference to his troubles; and even the offence that has brought him to the notice of the authorities—'having carnal knowledge' of a fifteen-year-old girl—turns out to have been committed with the eager acquiescence of his victim, who had, anyway, lied about her age. The only reason for Blanch's in- carceration that emerges from the pro- ceedings is that his anarchic vision, if translated into Widespread practice, might undermine the formal structure of society; but by the time this conclusion is reached, by a one-track route dotted with old Laing signposts, the doubt about his mental con- dition has come to seem less important than the certainty that he is an unholy bore—despite everything that Roy Dotrice, in an impassioned imitation-of-Christ perfor- mance, can do for him.
So far from influencing the course of civilisation, it is clear that Blanch's long- winded griping would empty any bar-room before the next round; but he loses his ap- peal, of course. Mr Cannan doubtless feels strongly about his hero's predicament, but it is hard to share his concern with characters that are little more than weary clichés from an amateur psychologist's stockpot, or for a situation so over-simplified that it has no recognisable reality. Blanch is a suitable case for comic treatment, but One at Night (just keep taking the sedatives) is so burdened with indignation and specious theorising that there is no room for the puncturing wit that once promised the theatre so much.
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