Kenneth Hurren on illusions in disarray
Theatrical productions so ill-conceived that they would seem to have no prospect of succeeding With any sort of audience likely to he gathered together in a metropolitan auditorium are, of course, no great novelty in the West End (every year has its doomed quota of them), but somehow they never fail to startle Me just a little. The last, thin vestiges of several romantic illusions are, I suppose, involved here. For Ol?e thing, in spite of the gathered wisdom and evidence of years of Professional theatregoing, I still think vaguely of London as the centre both of the dramatic art and of show business in Britain, the Place to which the liveliest talents operating in these spheres are compulsively drawn, and the PPearance here of a show that !las practically nothing going for it In the way of artistic merit is alWays something of a shock. For another, again in spite of long and Melancholy experience, I still regard producers as persons of Sorne slight literary discernment, rd managers as persons of some financial acumen, and when things 'urn up that not only throw perePtible doubt on the ability of the 'twiner to read but also look alni°St guaranteed to lose the latter ttheir shirts, I am taken aback by hose circumstances, too. For still ,a third, while I doubt if I ever thought of actors as especially sensitive judges of the quality of scriPts submitted to them, I have !‘etallied a trusting faith in their Instinctive avoidance of parts that et3tild only depress their admirers, and to encounter them burdened
with assignments that become them rather less happily than shrouds, is, to say the least, disquieting. Altogether, I seem to be astonishingly ingenuous,
In this circuitous fashion, we come to Bordello, a plainly expensive musical entertainment having to do with the exploits of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, visited upon us at the Queen's Theatre. It is announced as being based "on an original idea by Julian More and Carl Denker" and since neither of them seems to have had a friend candid enough to discourage him, the former went ahead and wrote the script (soliciting a score from a man named Al Frisch, and the collaboration of another named Bernard Spiro on the lyrics), while the latter devoted himself to the presentation of the completed work. I'm obliged to admit that my response to the effort after the first twenty minutes or so was strongly tinged with apathy, but the general idea seems to have been to investigate the circumstances in which Toulouse-Lautrec came to paint so many pictures of whores; or it may have been to illustrate the function of the brothel in the fantasy life of its customers (although in that event, the "original idea" might have been more properly credited to Genet); or, again, it may have been devised simply as promotional material on behalf of prostitution as a profession. I am disinclined to take this last possibility quite seriously, however: while it is true that the proceedings on the stage — a series of charades in which the painter is gaudily involved with the girls — are ostensibly arranged by the brothel-keeper in an endeavour to overcome the virtuous scruples of a prospective recruit, most careers mistresses would probably hold that the advantages of the game, and its opportunities for meeting the rich and famous, are more persuasively argued for girls of today in the law courts.
The Toulouse-Lautrec story is, after all, period stuff. To spare you a visit to your encyclopaedia, he died in 1901 at the age of thirtysix, and the years covered by Bordello are apparently the late eighteen-nineties when his life of extravagant lechery and alcoholism in Paris led to his being incarcerated in Neuilly asylum. He is personated at the Queen's by Henry Woolf, whose qualifications for the role seem to rest exclusively in the fact that he is able to play it without putting his knees in his boots, a posture that was possible for Jose Ferrer in a motion-picture about ToulouseLautrec but would plainly pose insurmountable problems on the stage.
Woolf, you will gather, is a small man; but he is not one of deformed and disagreeable aspect, as the artist was; he is, rather, quite dapper and chirpy, which is a tribute to his resilience in the teeth of as witless and dispiriting a script as he would be likely to find in an day's toddle, but is fairly disastrous to any aspirations the show may have had to making a serious psychological statement about Toulouse-Lautrec. It is probably less important that he is an indifferent singer, because I doubt whether any of the songs will be "reaching high on the hit parade" (the achievement, according to the programme notes, of Frisch's "first smash hit," 'This is No Laughing Matter') and such words of the lyrics as I was able to catch engendered no feelings of deprivation over those I was not.
In the event that the Evening Standard is not the paper of your choice, and if I may be permitted to nick another man's inspiration, I should like to report that its reviewer, Milton Shulman, was moved to quote the late Noel Coward as having once remarked that it was bad enough being a dwarf without being a boring dwarf. This is the thought that puts every thought about Bordello in a nutshell, so we'll leave it there, allowing just a few lines to commend to your notice Edith Evans . . . and Friends, at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in which Dame Edith reads some poems and some extracts from her roles of the past. At eighty-six, she is naturally no longer the great and commanding actress she used to be, nor even an especially impressive elocutionist, but she does her pieces with great affection and delightful humour and it is rather wonderful to be in her presence again, conceivably, sadly, for the last time.
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