Theatre
Casey's Court Rebuilt
By ALAN BRIEN Sparrers Can't Sing is a piece of Thirties music hall brilliantly preserved and pickled by Joan Littlewood. This is Casey's Court . rebuilt with what appear to be real bricks and mortar by designer John Bury. At just such a corner of the Buildings, between the Pub and the chip shop, between the Labour and have court, many of our most famous comedians 11ave presented just such a gallery of working- e,rlass grotesques. Here are the permanently un- shaven, half-dressed, out-of-work pigmy hus- bands in their uniforms of cloth cap, left-over waistcoat, collarless shirt and ragged neckerchief; the soft-hearted, hard-headed virago wives with their curlers, their turbans, their tatty fur-collared evening coats worn over wrap-around pinafores; the old grans like weathered tea-cosies who have run to fat after forty lean years; the lodgers with their nasty habits and insanitary pets. I would not have been surprised to see the other tradi- h.nnal stereotypes too—the eunuch vicar with in- tb8estion, the drunken toff with his collapsible °Peru hat, the baffled copper wiping his forehead Ith a red-spotted handkerchief, the Tommy Though on leave with his flat hat and puttees. 'lough the music hall has gone, these figures remain deeply imbedded in the folk-lore of the seaside postcard and the Crazy Gang. Sparrers day Sing puts them all back on the boards for a uaY in the life of Andy Capp. The time, according to the programme, is the Present. But it is the present superimposed on racial memories of the past so that only the women work, the pawnshop is still the poor man's bank, and the doors snap and the windows go blank at the sight of the Means Test man. Need- less less to say, Miss Littlewood's going-away present t`,1 us as she leaves for Broadway with The i :°31age deserves all the words which customarily -1)Plied to most Theatre Workshop productions wit has gusto, guts, warmth, sympathy, slapstick, sentiment and pace. But has the young actor turned playwright Stephen Lewis simply suc- ceeded in recreating a vanished entertainment after the fashion of those antiquarians under- heath the arches at the Players? Sparrers Can't s tng is still music hall, but by a kind of double bluff, a deliberate exercise in strabismus, Mr. rwis presents us with a mixture of bothNte linal and the imitation. Though hardly a play, itr ts. nevertheless first-class theatre. Despite the comical exaggerations and traditional over- thPhasis, it manages to be an honest and im- tces sive picture of the basic attitudes of the Nish working class. Some critics seemed to me to overpraise u;neken Soup with Barley partly because Arnold esker was holding up to them a mirror of their own childhood community. I recognise in Sparrers Can't Sing the habits, the jokes, the opinions, the characters, even occasionally rela- tives, from my school days. Together Miss Little- wood and Mr. Lewis never get a detail or an attitude wrong. Their urban landscape with figures is put together like a mosaic, but every tiny fragment fits. They know that when an ex- convict is trying to trace his runaway wife there is only one place in the neighbourhood which could supply documentation—the paper shop. They know that the teenage daughter, however far away she seems in a world of Babycham and pop records and motor-bikes, will still behave in her instinctive gestures and thoughtless expres- sions like a baby-faced parody of her mother. They have been outstandingly successful with the character of the grandmother—a cunning, kind- hearted old doughball marvellously well played by Amelia Baynturn. Granny remembers every- thing about everybody—she remembers which pork butcher's was previously an undertaker's after being a Chinese laundry, where anybody lives or ever has lived, what abortions and illegiti- macies and Borstal sentences and diseases have marked any family.
She is at her finest when she takes on the man from the National Assistance Board in single combat and routs him with her barrage of his- torical information. 'All your family's on the council, ain't they?' she' remarks with scornful pity. 'You didn't think I knew you, did you? But 1 did. I knew your mother too. Used to sell coloured comics down the Lane. Sold them in bundles and when you got them home they was all the same.'
The Assistance man is played by Roy Kinnear, who also doubles later as an ancient sandwich- board carrier. These are two brilliantly observed creations. As the representative of the law he is pink, flabby, nervously dictatorial with the un- comfortable air of a missionary who suspects that the docile natives are really measuring him for the pot. As the old derelict, he is continually scarlet with coughing and laughter—his two re- actions to any phenomenon in the unpredictable world. Like almost all the characters here (and in strong contrast to the depressed proles at the Royal Court), he vastly enjoys these great paroxysms at every tiny crisis. And yet he is never simply slapstick—observe the lingering admiration which occasionally glows on his face as he stumbles over the abandoned bedstead on the corner.
His scenes are mainly duets with the old hearth- stone pedlar with his lopsided grin and his con- tinual flow of meaningless agreeable conversa- tion. This part is played by the author under the name of Stephen Cato and is one long, dazzling, ludicrous improvisation from within. These con- versations in particular immediately bring Harold Pinter to mind. Mr. Lewis's dialogue is obviously not shaped and planned and orchestrated like Mr. Pinter. Here no nameless evils haunt the air. The demons which torment the inhabitants of Sparrers Can't Sing are only too well known and nick-named. But the final result, the circular arguments studded incongruously with place names and trade marks', the way people's words say one thing and the cock of the head another, the communication by oblique and apparently meandering monologues, is curiously similar.
There is no room for more than a mention of the others in this new generation of Littlewood graduates. Murray Melvin is back as the peaky, perky apprentice ted. Bob Grant as the father transferred straight from a Donald McGill card and Brian Murphy as the bird-fancying lodger are as good as ever. And Bettina Dickson, bulging like a tube of tooth paste squeezed in the middle, tittups and wiggles and gawps most sexily and sweetly as the daughter. Sparrers Can't Sing has no pretensions to be social comment. It is simply theatrical entertainment in a style which I was afraid was dead for ever. But because of the success of music-hall surface, it would be a mistake to overlook the genuine stream of emo- tion which runs just underground and which is often extremely moving.
'Your dancing is divine!'
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