Theatre
Papier-mdché
Christopher Edwards
Butley (Fortune)
Heart of Darkness (Gate at the Latchmere)
The new production of Butley, at the Fortune Theatre, is a depressing revi- val of the 1971 hit play that established Simon Gray's reputation as a clever di- agnostician of educated middle-class de- spair. Before this production I was still content to believe there was something in the author's characteristically acerbic view of the lives of dons and publishers, and that his projection of this world was original and even possibly true. I knew that in the intervening years he had (save for the excellent, underrated The Rear Column) Lbe. come a trifle repetitious, but Butley was his best play, the one that set him above the imitators he spawned in the Seventies. Alan Bates was the original Ben Butley, and what a terrific effect he must have had on me to sustain this particular illusion. Gray has at his disposal a number of operative definitions of the banalities of modern middle-class life, and a taste for banging out what is most reductive and Painful in them. He creates satellite char- acters — friends, wives, mistresses — and sets them up to be scored off by the central, articulate male figure who is left holding the stage, evasive and hollow to the last with, we infer, an ache somewhere to his soul. Ben Butley, an alcoholic htknglish lecturer at London University, is prototype of this early Seventies anti- ,",ero and maintains a running sardonic commentary on his collapse into emotional sterility. The curious thing is that he is
supposed to be an intellectual — perhaps the fact that he quotes T. S. Eliot estab- lishes his credentials. I do find it myste- rious that English dramatists go for the English don as some sort of representative of a failed ideal, but prove totally incap- able of investing him with anything re- motely resembling intellectual distinction. Willy Russell, Dusty Hughes and of course Gray himself — all of them shove in the odd literary allusion, a full bookshelf and maybe a taste for Wagner, and expect this to establish the higher mind. All they manage, though, are papier-mdché figures; in his recent play at the National, Chris- topher Hampton even managed to make Thomas Mann, of all people, sound pedes- trian!
From his first entrance we see Butley on the slide; sporting a blob of cottonwool on his chin, and carrying an old briefcase bursting with an empty whisky bottle, he arrives for the first day of the new term. His desk is a tip; reflexively he fends off undergraduates hungry for Wordsworth supervisions, and sinks into his chair to read Beatrix Potter. When his homosexual colleague Joey arrives, Bentley subjects him to a cruel interrogation. Gradually the strands emerge; Butley's wife, Anne, has left, taking with her the baby, whose name he cannot get right; Joey, his protégé, lover and flat-mate, failed to turn up the night before. It turns out he was up North with his new working-class publisher boy- friend. Tom, another colleague (`the big- gest bore in London'), hasn't been in touch lately, thereby fuelling Butley's paranoia — justified in this case as Tom is about to marry Anne. One is tempted to add 'etc, etc' to complete this routine cycle of failed personal relations. In order to make all this hang together, raise a laugh and, occasionally, to move, the Butley persona must beckon as well as repel. There is also the technical task of delivering destructive and often wordy jokes. Alan Bates succeeded through his qualities of authority, vulnerability, the suggestion of inner reaches of personality, and a cool perfectly turned off-hand manner which invited sympathetic identity. I'm tempted to attribute more miraculous pow- ers to him too because I remember laughing at jokes which here seem terribly hollow. John Nettles, who plays Butley, lacks that vital comic timing which can make an actor appear to be minting throw- away lines anew. I also missed the sense that he was desperately crumbling into seediness, a process we ought, surely, to feel we are witnessing. Nettles seems already to have regressed into a private world of controlled-detachment.
The other actors are workmanlike. Jeff Rawle's Joey is effective as a weak-minded Eng. Lit. careerist anxious for tenure, but I thought Daphne Goddard's Edna, a closet lesbian and Byron scholar, could have been played with more dignity. The office set (unattributed in the programme) con- sists of bare breezeblocks, high slit- windows and regulation office furniture; a fitting space for the hollow gloom that inhabits Gray's seat of learning.
`And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth . . .' is the point where John Tordoff, in Heart of Darkness, at Gate at the Latchmere, picks up the thread of Marlowe's narrative. By a judicious selection from Conrad's story, both the moral force and the narrative drive of that remarkable voyage to meet Mr Kurtz are condensed into two hours. The props of course are minimal; a table with a red cloth, a tiny Wedgwood tray containing foliage, a model paddle-boat and the occa- sional use of a muted jungle soundtrack. Tordoff, dressed in officers' uniform, de- livers the tale with all the insistent convic- tion of a mariner desperate to unburden himself of a testimony that he knows will astonish us. 'Do you see the story?' he asks; and, compellingly, we do. The even- ing is a triumph of tension sustained, even if, at times, an element of strain creeps into the technique as the actor, wide-eyed and aghast, shakes his head for the umpteenth time in disbelief at what he has seen. Amongst several moments of real power there must be included the scene on the boat as Kurtz lies dying: Tordoff chalks onto a board a totem-like head depicting the great monster and, lit only by a tiny candle, he squats down to re-live the death scene ending with a memorable rendering of Kurtz's awful cry . . . 'The horror! The horror!'
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