Theatre
Left Hooking
By BAMBER GASCOIGNE
High Street, China. (Theatre Royal, Stratford E.) Agnes Bernelle. (The Establish- ment.) Misalliance. (Royal Court.)
'WHERE are you off to?' 'High Street China.' This question and answer provides both theme and title for the new play by Robin Chapman and Richard Kane at Stratford East, Mixer Johnson is a . young boxer and local hero in Northampton. He can make £25 most Saturday nights and he naturally has a gang of friends, mates from his factory, who are always on hand to help him drink it. Then a childhood friend of his, Laury, comes back to the town. She is thin, jeaned. vivacious, irreverent; she has been to college, and has elevated the Jack Kerouac anti-bourgeois ethos of 'get up and go, man' to a romantic creed. She persuades Mixer and his friends to throw a party, to break into their factory and set the machines producing a berserk midnight cascade of plastic toys, and finally to join her on the open road outside Northampton thumbing a lift to any town, any country, anywhere but here, High Street, China—or more precisely, she concedes, if you' really want to be precise, why not Ireland?
Most of this is extremely well done. The stuffiness of the older generation, against whom the rebellion is really directed, is sketched in one or two brilliantly economical scenes, without falling into the usual trap of caricature. Other- wise the stage is left free for the teenagers, and their scenes on the whole are excellent. The wind-down is as good as the build-up. Mixer and two of his mates end up fifty miles from Northampton. Laury has swept on and out of their lives in a Jaguar; the other birds turned back on the outskirts of Northampton and hobbled grumbling home on their stilettos. The trio, with the dream ended, drift all night through the countryside trying to get home. Finally they wait in a tubular bus shelter for the first morning bus, and while they chat they go lackadaisically through gymnastic exercises on the bars of the shelter. I would have expected this to be a distracting director's gimmick—in- stead it is restful, extremely real, and by some quiet magic of concentration it even focuses attention more clearly on the words. The whole cast has been excellent, and Brian Murphy's direction superb throughout, but these last scenes cap the lot, with Kenneth Farrington, Larry Dann and Wilfrid Downing as the trio.
In the treatment of these three, and in its theme, High Street, China is reminiscent of Alun Owen's Progress to the Park, but I found it better than its predecessor. Its only failure is in the character of Laury. She could succeed merely as a creature enticing the others to break free, but the authors insist on using her as a Mouthpiece for some heavy but routine satirical comment on the burghers of Northampton. The dreary future in wait for Mixer and Co. is made subtly evident again and again in the play, and these gobbets of direct comment 'are quite un- necessary. So yet another good play is marred by a desire to be explicitly 'significant.'
Agnes Bernelle sings Brecht's songs far too soon after Lotte Lenya and has neither the voice
nor the personality to survive the comparison, Shaw's Misalliance, well directed by Frank Hauser, provides plenty of Shavian delights at the Royal Court; the best of all—'Read Mill, read Jefferson."Yes, democracy reads well, but it doesn't act well.'
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