Passion ploys
Peter Jenkins
Passion Play (Aldwych) Naked Robots (Warehouse) The Workshop (Hampstead) Touched (Royal Court) Picture-restoring James (Benjamin Whitrow) is happily-enough married to choirsinging Eleanor (Billie Whitelaw) when fun-loving Kate (Louise Jameson) drags him into bed and the start of an affair. Menopausal male meets promiscuous young woman here is the stuff of a dozen titillating West End comedies. But Peter Nichols is a writer who doesn't easily let go and in his new play he worries away at the subject of adultery with such obsessive tenacity that what could so easily have turned into a contrived and over selfconscious work (as was his Born in the Gardens) becomes as serious and substantial a piece of theatre as any we are likely to see this year.
Nichols is an intrepid playwright. Few would have dared, for example, to have employed the stagy device of giving James and Eleanor each their alter ego Jim (Anton Rodgers) and Nell (Eileen Atkins) -so that he can have his characters talk to themselves in our hearing and tear away the layers of truth and pretence before our eyes. Few would have attempted it and still fewer brought it off with the combination of Sheer gusto and professional cunning which Nichols has at his disposal. Few others Would have dared, confronting the danger of having written the whole of his play in Act One, to have adopted the stratagem of writing it again in Act Two and fewer still would have achieved by this means a Profound deepening of the whole work. He plays all manner of tricks upon us. To begin with the alter egos are mere voices of conscience, good or bad, but later he allows them to step out of their master characters even of playing a scene together. In matters plot he is without scruple and Eleanor's discovery of her husband's adultery is effected by a coincidence of which even Shakespeare might have been ashamed. Her girl-to-girl friendship with Kate after the affair has been discovered and supposedly ended is implausible both in terms of character and situation. No matter; Nichols is a writer who, when in form, can wrench you from your disbelief by the relentless argumentative drive of his dialogue. I suspect also that a study of the text might show the framework of religioussexual symbolism in which he has constructed the piece (the clue is in the title, Passion Play), to be less coherent than it seemed in the theatre. But no matter that either; the atmospheric unity of the play, reinforced by his use of religious music, enables him to end it with a theatrical tour de force in the form of a Christmas party at which Eleanor's alter ego leaves with her suitcase packed while Kate bares • her breasts to her lover from beneath a fulllength fur.
I took this to suggest the triumph of maleness at the end of a play which seemed to me to have been written in a spirit of tragic concern for the woman. James's alter ego, Jim, is a raffish fellow who instructs him not only in the pleasures of adultery itself but also its deceptions and risks. Eleanor's alter ego, on the other hand, is used to expose the misery of the wife and it is Nell who blurts out her anguish to the psychiatrist, provided by the love-hardened husband, and Nell again who is driven to the suicide attempt. And when Nell comes down the stairs with her suitcase at the end it is, we may suppose, Eleanor's broken spirit who is walking out of the marriage.
Some many find Nichols and this play too theatrical for their taste, and there are moments when he lays it on too thick or where false lines jar and break the spell, but I found myself drawn powerfully into this superbly well-acted and directed (by Mike Ockrent) production of a play which tugs throughout at both the emotions and the brain.
A squat is, I suppose, an apt enough metaphor for rootless youth but what goes on in squats all that shooting up and snorting and fucking is no less a cliché than what used to go on in Shaftesbury Avenue drawing rooms. Jonathan Gems's picaresque piece of juvenilia is over-long it runs for three hours with the interval and contains some dialogue which is crude to the point of self-pastiche. Nevertheless, there is a serious talent trying to organise itself here and Naked Robots (director John Caird) has a saving energy to it. Gems is telling us that his generation (he is 26) is looking for something more than sex and drugs and rock-and-roll, indeed is desperate and miserable in its deprived state, lacking in belief and romance. It is striking to come across so youthful a play about despair. I was struck by Catherine Hall when I first saw her playing a similar role in New End last year; here as Gemma, a pony-class girl turned punk, she again communicated the kind of energy which makes you sit up even on the Warehouse seats. There is a problem with plays about work. Work occupies a great deal of people's lives and a great deal of their energy goes into improving the condition of work and trying to enhance the satisfaction they receive from it. Yet for all that people don't really regard work as at the centre of their being. So there is a danger that plays about the working side of life miss the important inner life which gives interest to character. The French writer Jean-Claude Grumberg escapes this difficulty by setting his Zola-like scenes of garment-working life against the background of an event which rocked humanity itself. The most important characters in the piece are Jewish and the play, which covers the period from 1945 to 1952, traces their coming to terms with gassed loved ones and their own war-time behaviour.
A little on the slow side The Workshop is a well-written play, intelligent and true. which grapples to come to terms with a slice of 20th-century reality. Tom Kempinski took a liberty in translating it into contemporary East End idiom but this helps it to live on the stage which it certainly does under Nicholas Kent's direction.
Stephen Lowe's Touched starts with Richard Dimbleby's famous broadcast from Belsen but it is soon apparent that here is a paste-and-scissors evocation of the postwar moment inspired, no doubt, by a working class 'consciousness' and a socialist commitment but little concerned with the kind of truth that writers should be interested in. The result is sentimental and often theatrically vulgar. Sandra decides to have her illegitimate child as a symbol of the rebirth which the women of Nottingham are sure will result from the war and in the election-of a Labour government. But her pregnancy turns out to be imaginary, as does in Lowe's view the rebirth of the nation. So his three Chekhovian sisters are left to live out their lives in proletarian provincialism.
By the interval I had had nearly enough of this sub-Weskerian proletcult but the play got better in the second half and I admired the staging of the final picnic scene with its huge mirror effect. I also admired the realistic acting of Marjorie Yates. although the nudity forced upon her in the bathtub scene is vulgar and gratuitous.
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