Dim old things ARTS
HILARY SPURLING
The English theatre has seldom been noted for looks, indeed more for signal failures in this line than for conspicuous success, but we have at present two remarkable young designers, both well to the fore last week : Christopher Morley with Much Ado About Nothing for the Royal . Shakespeare Company, and Hutchinson Scott with new plays at the Savoy and St Martin's. These two represent opposite poles in the theatre; each mirrors, with a flair amounting at times to genius, the particular values of our two most powerful and prominent schools.
At Stratford, Mr Morley has roofed the stage and built side panels to make a kind of glasshouse: a translucent, airy structure gleam- ing with pale greenish light for garden scenes, or dimmed to indicate a Jacobean great house, vast state apartments and a high-ceilinged ball- room hung with 'smirched worm-eaten tapestries.' Three topiary birds make Leonato's orchard. A fleet of narrow, high-backed, wooden chairs drawn up to one side of an empty stage somehow suggests—with candle- flames flickering behind bottlegreen glass and music in the next room—that mixture of oppression and elation before the ball begins. This abstract handling of light and space, the bold imagination, the richly gleaming surfaces and formal severity of the screens which frame the stage, are characteristic of Mr Morley, who has designed chiefly for sixteenth and seven- teenth century plays.
Mr Scott, on the other hand, works in colour combinations of limegreen and mauve or mush- room; his sets—draped, frilled, tightly padded, crammed with plastic flowers and mock pilasters —are regularly furnished by the Old Times Furnishing Company; Old Times, even down to a bold blue skycloth complete with painted fir tree, is his style. It follows that Mr Scott is much in demand for contemporary texts—he has nearly half a dozen sets at the moment in the West End—for his decors faithfully re- flect the pallid vulgarity, the synthetic surfaces and bulgy self-satisfaction of the school of comedy most favoured on the London stage. William Douglas Home's The Secretary Bird (Savoy)—whose plot, like Mr Scott's set, is a miracle of modest ingenuity—shows the school at its best; Ira Wallach's Out of the Question (St Martin's) its shoddy, disingenuous and maudlin worst.
The mood of both plays is less of gaiety or glamour than of a palpable despondency. Basic- ally these characters seem to see themselves as dim old things (age, the fact that they are all nearing fifty or past it, is one of their most dismally recurrent themes) gallantly keeping pace with a naughty world. Even infidelity is not what it was—reduced in The Secretary Bird to a series of drearily persistent catechisms as to whether and when penetration actually took place; modern youth—and it is a mark of Mr Douglas Home's adroit discretion that he keeps it well off-stage—is represented at the St Martin's by a sprightly pair of positively fright- ful unction.
The best thing in either play, and one of the best on any London stage, is a dazzling per- formance at the Savoy by Kenneth More, who plays on his audience, as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern could not, from the lowest note to the top of the compass. It adds a poignant, extraneous bitterness when he is reconciled at last to his bolting wife—an intensely disagree- able lady signalling strenuous emotion with pinched lips and fretfully flared nostrils. Mr More has a habit of sloping up silently on the guilty pair to tap one or other on the shoulder; their shrill brays and startled leaps reflect the gulf, both in technical aplomb and in terms of emotional warmth and generosity, between his world and theirs. At the St Martin's, Dulcie Gray has something of this bland, malicious, comical composure; Michael Deni- son assumes a painful condescension which, though understandable, is unforgivable in an actor towards his text. Both plays paint a sobering picture of age in keen distress.
With Trevor Nunn's Much Ado we move into a world of sombre and often sinister grandeur, a world of spies and peepers traced in a succession of enchanting images : from the stately patterns of the ball, fit setting for those elusive exchanges between masked dancers, to a band of gaudy, beaked and snouted mummers, through the desolate centre of the play and out again to a girl in a sunny green garden, lying on her back on a wooden bench and laughing up at Benedick. But it is Hero who, as Hazlitt said she could be, is 'the principal figure in the piece and leaves an indelible impression on the mind . . .' Helen Mirren's Hero is the adored daughter round whom her father's house re- volves, still damp from the nursery with a childish, grave docility and a child's plump nose and cheeks beneath her bare, plucked forehead. Even Beatrice, of whom she is plainly much in awe, takes second place. Hero's earnest attempts to cap Don Pedro's wit, delivered with frowning concentration and snorts of nervous giggles, are in imitation of her cousin's in- souciant innuendoes.
Bernard Lloyd's Claudio is similarly young and petulant; tears come as easily as his ready smiles when the match is finally arranged. The incredulous conceit of this beaming pair, and their desperate awkwardness, as they stand tongue-tied surrounded by a ring of curious spectators, is most delicately taken; and most delicately paralleled by Claudio's stridency and Hero's appalling silence, again before a watch- ful congregation, on her grim wedding morning.
Hero collapses, a stiff, ungainly doll with eyes shut and slowly opening in an impassive face as she listens to her father's speech of brutal and venomous rejection. It is this scene, with its image not so much of strength or courage as of frozen pain agaihst a background of violence, cruelty and the frenzied promptings of her friends, which replaces Beatrice's calamitous `Kill Claudio!' as the dark centre of the play. For Janet Suzman, though shrewish enough— indeed too shrewish, too close to the obstreperous high spirits of her Katharine—has neither Beatrice's subtlety nor her unsentimental hardness. Both she and Benedick, chuckling benignly in his beard, seem too complacently aware of mutual attraction to suggest much scratchiness or spite, let alone the genuine apprehension of 'all disquiet, all horror and perturbation follow her.'
Alan Howard's Benedick, brilliantly giddy yet with a certain quixotic sweetness and sus- ceptibility, is at his best in the second half of the play, in his deliciously protracted gulling, in his scenes with Claudio or with Margaret in the garden. And Susan Fleetwood's Margaret —teasing Benedick so indelicately and yet with an exquisite innate delicacy, or driving Hero frantic with the Duchess of Milan's gorgeous gown—is one of the most delectable things in this production; Rowena Cooper's Ursula, so radiantly pert and tart, is another; and Norman Rodway makes a powerful Don Pedro, grave, benevolent, attentive and yet with a disturbing ambivalence, that undercurrent of malignity or impotence which marks the grown world in this play.
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