REVIEW OF THE ARTS
Kenneth Hurren on sugar cake and a bird on the wing
The idea of reviving No. No, Nanette doubtless appealed to its promoters because of an excited calculation that it would get nostalgia glands throughout the kingdom pumping away like steam calliopes playing 'Tea for Two.' The calculation seems to me, however, to be terribly flawed. If this was indeed the inspiration that prompted the present exhumation at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, it must be the only show that has ever been wilfully aimed at a dying audience.
This is not heartlessly and arbitrarily to blow the whistle on all septuagenarians, but the facts have to be faced: there really aren't all that many active theatregoers about who remember being bowled over by this ticky-tacky twaddle back in 1925 (just to place the period for you, that was the year Steve 175ono' ghue won the last of his Derbies on Manna, and John Barrymore, played Hamlet at the Haymarket), and their already limited number is, in the nature of things, steadily diminishing. Further, a great many of these survivors, however mistily they may look back to the theatrical glories of their youth, will almost certainly find — when confronted with an actual example — that their tastes have, disillusioningly changed. It takes a rather special kind of chap to be carried away by the notion of showing off his wife's sugar cake, to his chums (" See this cake, ,boys? Little woman made it of sugar! Woke up at daybreak to bake it, too! "), and I suspect he vanished with the Coolidge administration and the Stutz Bearcat.
Clearly this impediment to the success of their enterprise was overlooked by Messrs H. M. Tennent Ltd, Arthur Cantor, Pyxidium Ltd and Cyma Rubin, not to mention one Burt Shevelove who adapted and directed the show and decided to bill it — perhaps because of a niggling, last-minute dubiety about the appeal of antiques in this particular field — as "the new 1925 musical " ( my italics, Shevelove's prevarication).. The reason may be that time stands almost still for many theatrical people, who probably think , of the success of The Boy Friend as being only yesterday, whereas in fact it was twenty years ago and twenty years closer to the period of which it was both parody and pastiche, and, in being both, was a new 1920s musical, incorporating special elements of appeal even to those too young to remember the absurd genre it so affectionately spoofed. No, No, Nanette is the relentlessly roguish, awful original itself; and it has nothing in common with The Boy Friend, other than one of its leading ladies, Anne Rogers, who is also, alas, twenty years older, but is nevertheless a plucky trouper in the most dispiriting circumstances and one of the production's TeVprofesslonal assets. The failure to notice the mileage running up on the clock perhaps accounts, too, for the employment of Dame Anna Neagle, 96, in a song-and-dance role, which cannot but embarrass her, given that her voice can barely be heard above the static of her hidden. microphone (I don't know where it is hidden, or who is the cruel joker who equipped her with it. but last week it crackled away incessantly, like a cricket rubbing its legs together, whenever she ventured on the stage). She was game enough to have a little stab at the charleston, and was wildly and sympathetically applauded by ' admirers who plainly felt that any gesture more extravagant than holding a hand above her head — as though hailing a cab, or conceivably signalling for help — was a grave imposition upon a lady of her advanced years. She is partnered by Tony Britton, who will remind almost no one of Jack Buchanan (who was probably the producers' first choice until someone broke the bad news), in the role of a publisher of Bibles around whose philanderings the plot — to use the word with a looseness that verges on the dissolute — revolves..
Nothing that might be identified as wit disturbs the gruesome foolishness of dialogue that can best be described as unspeakable, in both senses of the word. No one makes any discernible attempt to appear or sound American, though the scene is allegedly New York and Atlantic City. The score by Vincent Youmans has a tinkly charm (there may be a couple of other tunes you'll recognise apart from 'Tea for Two "), and the costumes are amusing in the frightful sort of way you'd expect of the period.
It was only in the matter of musical comedy, I discover on investigation, that 1925 was a daunting year. In other respects it .seems to have been notably distinguished, seeing the first London productions of works as variously renowned as Coward's Hay Fever, O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, Travers's A Cuckoo in the Nest and O'Neill's The Emperor Jones. It was also the year in
which the British theatre became serously aware of Anton Chek hov, through productions of The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull. Both, by coincidence, are revived this week.
The National Theatre production of the former does not open before these notes appear, and it would seem sensible to review the two revivals together, but I cannot reasonably delay my com mendation to your attention of the Chichester Festival Theatre's The Seagull, directed by Jonathan Miller with a respect and restraint that caught me by pleasant sur prise. There is a forbidding pro gramme note taken from a discourse on "living matter" by T.
H. Huxley, which I feared might have some eccentric influence on' the proceedings, but nothing un
toward came of it, and I have OS the most tentative reservatio about the performance itself, a those mainly to do with go,,. Stephens's interpretation of . novelist, Trigorin. Stephens is t clined to be shifty, I think, in tr last act, making a callous sedlice of a man who is really a decal' enough sort, his head brieg turned by the admiration of 14,i1,, but otherwise wholly absorbee; his writing: he really has fag; ten the seagull incident and 10 symbolic significance. The cast„ generally very fine, and the NAI"" and Konstantin of Maur': O'Brien and Peter Eyre are as II; sitively and intelligently plaYeu, any I have seen. I hope to go In it rather more fully next week. hi Meanwhile, in London, director-designate of Chichest''i 'Keith Michell (he takes over ne$ season), is playing Robert WO' ing to Geraldine McEwan's Eh beth Barrett in Dear Love (at t‘", Comedy), a duologue arranged,,1 Jerome Kilty from the cour„, letters and poems. It is seldn; stirring but wholly pleasing.,4 the World Theatre Season dwych) the Cracow Stary These' Company has returned with drzej Wajda's imagined, complex, coenifaubseerdatbeut ultimately stunning — and su.,,Pea,''
bly performed (Jan Nowicki, ; tor Sadecki, Izabela Olszevia""„f and others) — dramatisation Dostoievsky's The Possessed
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