ARTS & AMUSEMENTS
The Violent Years
By HILARY SPURLING
Treasure Island. (Mermaid.)—The Thwarting of Baron Bolligrew. (Aldwych.)—Peter Pan. (Scala.)—Give a Dog a Bone. (Westminster.) —Charlie Girl. (Adelphi.) MHIS promises to be a fine Christmas at the
I theatre for anyone in the violent years from five upwards. I recommend starting with the Mermaid, where the sudden, shattering roar of cannon brought not a squeak from the audience, only a calm, rapturous murmur as of, a crowd watching Roman candles on a still night. This Treasure Island is one of the best things on any London stage. Sally Miles's production, now in its second year, is so thoroughly lived in that there Leo McKern is no room for doubt about gargling screams, hair- breadth escapes, knives between the teeth. Faces are smeared and blubbered with sweat. Breath comes wheezily through gappy teeth, and clothes are greasy and slept in. A bottle swung against an enemy's head smashes in splinters, and the stage is littered with broken glass, empty tankards, apple cores, spilt blood and rum.
Wolfit's Long John Silver has a face like one of those crumbling, soft-stone Roman Emperors round the Sheldonian before it was cleaned, a coarse-featured peasant's face, scored and pitted, overlaid with the grime of years both moral and physical. Eyebrows thick as sausages and a rosy knob of a nose obscure the warning in his cold pig eyes. Explaining what happens to anyone foolish enough to cross him, he glances at a green apple in his palm. His fist clenches, unclenches, and a handful of apple-pulp splatters on the ground at his feet.
He is supported by a truly filthy crew—from Clive Elliott's sinister Blind Pew to Edward Kelsey's gluey, hook-nosed Israel Hands—and, more important, foiled by parties who are not only. good but, human. There are plenty of admirable villains about, but no heroes to com- pare with Stevenson's Trelawney, Smollett and
Hawkins, all three beautifully played. Moreover--a boon to parents who do not fancy giving a run- ning commentary—the exposition is masterly.
Take the incident with the apple. It is only when Silver has wiped his hands and called genially for another apple, that we remember young Jim Hawkins crouched inside the apple barrel, where he has overheard Silver's nefarious plot and now awaits discovery and instant death.
By comparison, The Thwarting of Baron Bolligrew is wordy and hard to follow. Also its band of goodies are so weedy that none with the worldly wisdom of 'five years or more would lay any odds at all on their coming out top. Given the choice between them, and Leo McKern as Bolligrew, Nicholas Selby as Blackheart, Robert Bolt as his own dragon, there was no question which side one's allegiance lay. This Bolligrew, with his genteel vowels, his crooked little finger, his loud voice, loud gun, loud choice of checks, sees nothing amiss in his twin pursuits: "untin' and grindin' the faces of the poor.' He is a simple soul until a sea bf troubles descends upon him. At the end, hounded and battered among his own scenery, prey, to self-doubt and social anxiety, he makes the only choice left to him— to beard the dragon in his den—whieh can make him, if not a gentleman, at least not wholly despicable in the eyes of the establishment who Flave invaded his estate.
The pirates at the Scala, got up like the lads from Penzance, are a gawky and fainthearted lot. I was sorry to see that Noodler did not have his hands fixed on backwards. Ronald Lewis's Hook seemed a good chap at heart, touchingly anxious to find himself a-mother, and Sylvia Syms made a fetching Pan without Peter's streak of cruel amorality. It wasia shock to me to find that this was by no means Barrie's text. Apart from cuts (including the more risqud passages between Peter and Wendy) and numerous inane interpolations, whatever happened to Tiger Lily, the Indian queen, fending off her amorous braves with a hatchet and going with stoic indifference to her death? We were fobbed off with a rosy-cheeked, pigtailed camp-follower who pleaded hysterically for mercy. Worst of all, both the frolics in the lagoon and the celebrated water fight passed off without the faintest splash.
Give a Dog a Bone, or Good Clean Fun as it is affectionately known, is billed as a pantomime though it has no man dressed up as a woman, no principal boy and a very mangy pantomime animal (I mean the dogskin, not Mr. Colin Farrell inside it). The Good Fairy who flew down from the skies was a fresh-faced, youth, and the jokes ('Eighteen carat.' Sure it's not seventeen parsnips?') were often rather above our heads. If these are minor flaws, the real failure lies deeper—perhaps I expected, too much from a play by Peter Howard, late head of MRA. but I must report that this one made little attempt, to set up a conflict and none whatsoever to work out its themes. There were one or two gestures early on—a refrain condemning the selfishness of humanity and the Fairy's song, a liberal reproof to King Rat : 'I care for the white and the black and the brown. The folks in the village, the folks in the town, I care, I care.' All very well, but he didn't do much about it. The, play's message seemed to be that the man in the street is lazy, bad-tempered and mean. Efforts to influence him, by both Rat and Fairy, were feeble in the extreme. All in all a sad disappointment, though I was consoled by the interior of the cottage in Scene 2, a surprising and effective copy of Van Gogh's Bedroom with the window open.
Lastly, a restyled Cinderella : Charlie Girl (all Miss Anna Neagle's dresses and Miss Hy Hazell's dress in Act 1 by Norman Hartnell) is laden with nostalgia and has little to offer, to anyone outside the Norman Hartnell generation. Always excepting Derek Nimmo as a gormless young spark attempting to pass himself off as a butler. Mr. Nimmo would be exquisite as either Wooster or Jeeves; as both together he is incomparable.
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