itEVIEW OF THE ARTS
Kenneth Hurren implores Good Bond, for Jesus' sake forbear
Bingo by Edward Bond; with John Gielgud, Arthur Lowe (Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square)
John, Paul, George, Ringo . . . and Bert by Willy Russell (Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue)
Shakespeare, like Edward Bond's play about him, seems to have been largely a fiction. It is one of the reasons — perhaps the fundamental one, though there are, I'm afraid, others — why the play is a failure.
Bond has gone out of his way in an introductory note "to protect the play from petty criticism" by mentioning, or admitting, a few trifling instances in which he has, for his reasonable dramatic convenience, played hob with the facts. What he signally fails to grasp is* that the premise upon which he builds — the supposition that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by a man of approximately that name who was born at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and who died there in 1616 — is very little more than a literary legend. He has been struck, as others have been before him, by the extraordinary discrepancy between everything that is known of the Stratford man and everything that was written under the name of Shakespeare, but from that point his process of deductive reasoning lets him troublingly down. Here, on the one hand, is this rather mean, money-grubbing merchant and property owner, sprung from modest yeoman stock, not known to have possessed or even to have read a book, only able to write his own name (of which he was uncertain of the spelling) in a hand so laborious that, as Professor Trevor-Roper has observed, "some graphologists suppose the hand to have been guided," and thus, naturally, never claiming any literary gift; he is not known to have had acquaintance with anyone of literary, artistic or scholarly bent; he died unsung and generally unremarked, and was buried with a self-chosen epitaph of a poetic quality not much less than that of the average birthday-card effusion. Here, on the other hand, is the most sublime dramatic poetry in the language, instinct of wit and as civilised in its values and humanitarianism as it is felicitous in expression, apparently dashed off in an inspired period of twenty years or so.
Confronted with contradictions of this order, the detached, objective mind might most logically conclude that what we have here is an inexplicable confusion of the records of two quite different men; that the received myth, though picturesque, is not to be taken altogether seriously; and that the mystery of the Shakespearian authorship is a matter to be left to the literary detectives, burrowing away in the eternal hope of uncovering some decisive clue. Bond's trouble — and there is no doubt but that it has beleaguered his thinking to the point of distraction — is that, as though he were some blinkered academic possessed of the arrogance of the second-rate mind, not to mention a vested interest in the Shakespeare industry, he has felt bound to reconcile the contradictions in philosophical terms. He brings them finally to an acceptable point of contact in his play by the weird contention that Shakespeare either killed himself because his life was so much at odds with his values, or else was "a reactionary blimp or some other fool." He has thought deeply about King Lear (and he has, of course, written a magnificent play of his own on parallel themes), but it has ultimately taken him up a philosophical cul-de-sac.
"Shakespeare created Lear, who is the most radical of all social critics," he writes, and then falls to brooding about a spent old dramatist, disintegrating in his fifties with the evidence all about him of a world deserving even more radical social criticism, but clutching his money and his rents about him and able to offer none. His plays had shown a need "for sanity and its political expression, justice. But how did he live? His behaviour as a property-owner made him closer to Goneril than to Lear. He supported and benefited from the Goneril society — with its prisons, workhouses, whipping, starvation, mutilation, pulpit-hysteria and all the rest of it."
The disparity between preaching and practice is a valid enough subject for dramatic exploration, and it is understandable enough that Bond, as a writer himself, should feel especially grieved by the demonstration of the disparity at its widest in the life and work of a man whom he would doubtless regard as the greatest of all writers; but he would clearly have done better to have developed his theme around some wholly fictional figure. The play as he has written it seems little more than a protracted non sequitur. It is also, beyond that, a great bore, whimpering and limping painfully from one set-piece to another, nowhere driven by the impetus of its own events or, indeed, by any kind of dramatic clarity.
John Gielgud, who is burdened with the role of the Shakespeare character, sits in the Stratford garden, his spirit bleeding from every pore, brooding on the awfulness of life and quite conceivably of his lines. His great struggle, I suspect, is to keep awake. Even in a tavern encounter with Ben Jonson (laconically and amusingly taken by Arthur Lowe) he is permitted no roistering. "Shakespeare's last binge was with Jonson and Drayton," writes Bond, parading one of the romantic legends as accepted fact; "only Jonson is shown in the play." I can't say I missed Drayton especially, but I could have done with the binge.
The corruption of art by commerce, so distressing to Edward Bond, is also, at a different level, the concern of Bert — the one character you won't have heard of in the title of Willy Russell's lively musical about the Beatles. Russell himself doesn't push the point, but Bert rather goes on a bit and — as commentator on the career of his heroes, in a role as their disillusioned Liverpudlian contemporary — is given to some fairly extravagant outbursts, "They were the greatest phenomenon in the history of music," he remarks. "They went" to the top of the universe and found that the stars were made of tinsel." There is, as you can see, a gaudy touch of hyperbole in Bert's approach and I was quickly out of patience with him. The Beatles themselves, though, are engagingly dealt with. They are played with remarkable verisimilitude by Bernard Hill, Trevor Eve, Phillip Joseph and Antony Sher; and a girl called Barbara Dickson sings stunningly the selection of their numbers that punctuates the action. It is probably a little too soon to get the Beatles and their era into true perspective, but the present show is pleasant and vivacious enough to serve in the interim.
Kenneth Hurren is also Associate Editor of The Spectator.
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