The desert set ARTS

HILARY SPURLING

John Hanson, whose company is giving The Desert Song at the Palace, has taken more than a million pounds at provincial box-offices with this and similar revivals in the past ten years. This is his first appearance in the West End and if, as seems likely, it turns out a huge success, it will be with a peculiar and so to speak specialised audience.

Not that musical values have changed much since the 'twenties—the only real difference seems to be that, where The Desert Song is frank, modern musicals have to be furtive. Basically they still cater for manly men and womanly women, for the masterful, booted hero who would dearly like to lead an un- complicated life in a cave at the head of a band of savage tribesmen, to fling a palpitating virgin over his saddle and ride with her into the moonlight pursued in vain by the entire Foreign Legion. And, such being the generosity of script-writers, The Desert Song is equally good to the girl who would like to be snatched up and carried away—nothing lustful or sordid about this transaction—alternatively, to be delivered over to an Arab sultan, forcibly stripped by male slaves, flung into wicked warm baths of rose-water, visited by night on silken harem cushions; at the end, to emerge un- scathed in time for a lavish white wedding, with the honeymoon suite booked on an ocean cruiser. The whole to take place in a kind of cocktail lounge on the edge of the desert, against furniture provided by the Old Times Furnishing Company.

All this, it seems to me, is eminently reason- able in fact, the least one might ask of a day- dream; and the advantage of The Desert Song is that, along with properly swoony music, its views are held with more conviction and more vigorously expressed than Broadway can manage today. But what marks this particular production out, at least from anything else to be seen in the West End, are Mr Hanson's stan- dards of acting, direction and set design: the cardboard rocks, the painted backcloth with its seam of puckered stitching down the middle, the chorus jammed up in front of the drop- curtain and trying unsuccessfully to drown the scene-shifters' crashing and crunching behind.

This is a distinction not so much in quality as in kind. Mr Hanson's company make little attempt at acting as we know it, their posture would drive a PT instructor to drink, and their costumes remind one of the old days when everyone found his own—or of the story of the young actor, making his debut as the slave, Sahib, in The Castle Spectre, whose sister sewed flannel calf-pads to go inside his flesh-coloured tights; but, in a struggle with Earl Percy, the pads twisted round to the front of his shins and the audience roared with laughter. This production fosters the same sort of bonhomie— not simply for a distant, comforting view of life, but also for a kind of theatre which has passed beyond recall. It must be the only show in London which gives no credit to a designer on the programme.

Which by default serves as a sharp reminder —that, if our playwrights are on the whole an uncouth band and directors thin on the

ground, the level, of visual sophistication on the London stage has never been higher, at least not since Inigo Jones. Not that we have grounds for complacency—we have little to compare, for instance, with the technical and imaginative originality of the Czech designer, Josef Svoboda. And, in a 'week which pro- duces both the Svoboda exhibition at the RIBA (off to Manchester today) and Mr Han- son's amazing throwback, it is worth remem- bering that the English have a sorry history of reluctance and conservatism in this field, lagging fifty years behind the Continent all along the line, from primitive mediaeval `houses' to the nineteenth century box set. In fact, it is still the antique box set--the scrupulous replica of courtroom, library, patio —which regularly gets a round of applause in London today. This, which we may call the Maples or Old Times School, is typified in a designer like Hutchinson Scott whose sets— eminently practical and comfortable in, say, lime green and mustard—have a positive flair for picking on the bland, the drab and the vulgar in mainstream furnishing fashions.

Old Times is exclusive to the commercial theatre; in fact, design is the one field in which the West End proper still hobbles dismally after the subsidised arm of the theatre. There are, of course, notable exceptions: Richard Pilbrow for one (whose company, as one might expect, are lighting consultants to the National Theatre)—remember his frost-nipped hunting scene, all done by lights, on an otherwise un- distinguished set for Jorrocks; and his mellow afternoons, his stray shafts of sunlight, which did as much as anything else to conjure up the heady sexuality of a girls' school in Miss lean Brodie. But on the whole the commercial theatre is seldom imaginative or subtle, and then only with the playwrights whose values it best understands—in Cecil Beaton's gorgeous, jewelled, fretwork smoking-room for Lady Windermere's Fan, or Anthony Holland's swathed drawing-rooms for An Ideal Husband, which brilliantly mirrored Wilde's dropsical, worldly, tarnished society. Shaw is another who, for the same reason, has inspired a series of gay, gaudy and pleasantly witty designs.

But, if our theatre is for once not hope- lessly behind the times, it is largely thanks to the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court. Their new playwrights may be mediocre but their choice of designers is almost always impeccable. Here, the sets which take the breath away are generally in the orthodox, painterly style— using line, colour and fastidious detail to bring out the imagery and atmosphere of a particu- lar play. And, if we have no one in this style of the stature of, say, Lila da Nobile, Franco Zeffirelli, Pier Luigi Pizzi, we have at least a dozen designers who are capable on occa- sion of the same richness and delicacy: wit- ness, for instance, Sally Jacobs's glovkin.. Italianate set for Twelfth Night (RsT); Motley s Trelawny (NT); Abd'Elkader Farrah's Three Sisters (Royal Court). What we are not yet used to is anything approaching Svoboda's boldness. We have barely attempted his exploitation of theatrical techniques to rival film and television, his use of mirrors, machinery, electric rails, hydraulic lifts, kaleidoscopic patterns of reflected and projected images. Svoboda may be sometimes over-elaborate, even fussy—as in his set for the tar's Storm—but he has also a vein of baroque richness and, judging from the RIBA exhibition,

has been moving lately towards something more severe: vast solid blocks which may be shuffled vertically or horizontally to make corridors, staircases, closets for a Tudor Hamlet or (a favourite Czech theme) bleak fables on modern bureaucracy. We have seen nothing quite like the simplicity of his 1963 set for Oedipus Rex—a flight of shallow white steps rising from audience level out of sight, which gives off an almost palpable sense of Sophocles' generosity, clarity and humanity.

The only comparable revolutionary genius in England is John Bury, at the head of the Strat- ford workshops since 1964. Mr Bury designed the Wars of the Roses—and, if his modern sets are less memorable (though remember his gaunt suburban interior for the Homecoming in greys and dead-black ink), it is because the asfs plays have been comparatively so dim.

The history plays revealed an extraordinary imaginative wealth, not simply in the way Mr Bury makes the corner of a battlefield out of a cart and a puff of smoke, a harbour with two ropes and a looming shape for the side of a ship; beyond this, in his merging and melting from a warm, pink and apricot cottage garden to dank castle vaults, from throne-room to battlefield to forest glade, with the fluency and immediacy of film; at the same time, losing nothing of that subtle intensity peculiar to the theatre—the sense of being at once securely inside an illusionary world, and relishing the illusion from outside. This particular sophisti- cation is something no other art can offer and, however richly we got by on language alone in the past, something a great designer can only intensify.

A flair for design is also something all Italian babies are born with; and drew gasps and spontaneous clapping from the audience at the Aldwych on Monday, for the Piccolo Theatre of Milan in Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters. The curtain goes up on a bright after- noon in the open air—crumbling, gingery brick, tattered cloths bleached by the sun, the in- evitable abandoned Chianti bottle—and a makeshift scaffolding in the middle of the stage. The company, in ringlets, masks, knee breeches and embroidered coats, stand blinking in pre- tend sunlight and frozen in the ancient com- media dell'arte poses.

What is delicious about this production (by Giorgio Strehler; sets by Ezio Florence) is its artificiality, its blend of the casual and the expert—the actors roughing and tumbling and yet so ineffably graceful. There is the same combination in Goldoni's ramshackle plot, crammed with dotty old men, nosy servants, absurdly inconsequential lovers, all so improb- ably entangled in the trafficky backstreets of Venice. Gianfranco Mauri's Brighella, stam- mering and wringing his apron with a chef's professional pride, Relda Ridoni's melting Beatrice, Franco Graziosi as her grand, histrionic yet practical lover, all have a kind of intuitive delicacy. Best of all is Ferrucio Soleri's Arlecchino who runs up a chair like a fly up a wall or, for no reason at all, scoops imaginary water in his hat and abruptly falls to scrubbing the floor. The play is punctuated with these ravishing mimes like beads on a string—Arlecchino and

the breadcrumb, Arlecchino and the missing banknote, above all Arlecchino and the English Pudding, which turns out to be a crenellated amber jelly whose quivering spreads until both jelly and harlequin are frantically jerking as one. This is one of many climaxes for the meal in Act Two, a crescendo so reckless, risky and complex that one feels, by the end, that anyone who missed it has barely lived.

And so to the Mermaid and Bernard Miles, who has succeeded, where no one else could, in sentimentalising Euripides. I phigenia in Aulis and Hecuba make up the first instalment of a two-part series of Trojan Wars which, by a disastrous miscalculation, Mr Miles has chosen to set in the First World War—hard to imagine two philosophies so implacably imposed as these, of ancient Greece and the Kaiser in 1918. The whole is set on a dingy ramp by Adrian Vaux, an unhappy marriage between classical ruin and obsolete tank which pretty well sums up the mood of this remarkably slack pro- duction.