THE SPECTATOR
• ARTS • LETTERS • MONEY. LEISURE THEATRE
Roundhouse Rabelais
KENNETH HURREN
am not sure what is the current standing of Francois Rabelais among literary scholars. These are gamey and dissolute times, and I suspect his bawdiness is too elementary to sustain the appeal it may once have had, though a vague aura of notoriety continues to surround his name in the popular imagination (in which his works occupy a position roughly compar- able to that held by, say, The Specialist or Ulysses). As to his reputation as a satirist, while the pungency and cunning of his lampoons can be recognised, it is the inevit- able lot of any satirist that his apprecia- tive audience dwindles in exact proportion to the success of his satires in getting rid of the follies and abuses that provoked them. The twin circumstances probably mean that Rabelais isn't actually read very much these days, and although Jean-Louis Barrault, in his Rabelais, tries to suggest a number of contemporary analogues (some mild, some wild). I can't think that this spectacular blend of pageant and parable. philosophical argument and Renaissance rave-up, will send many new readers hot- foot to the library shelves.
M Barrault plainly sees the lusty old libertarian as a man after the hippy hearts of today's young rebels, and certainly as a man after his own. Dismissed from the Odeon-Theatre in 1968, after ten years of stirring achievement, M Barrault is said to have poured most of his life savings, as well as a lifetime's store of theatrical expertise. into his production of Rabelais at a former Paris wrestling arena, the Elysee-Montmartre. It was at once a bold bid to revive his theatrical fortunes and a ferocious riposte to the student revolution- aries who had accused him of snuggling in the pocket of the Gaullist establishment. and it succeeded on both counts. Having instantly set the Seine afire. the show was acclaimed the following year in Germany. Belgium, Italy, America (New York, Los Angeles and. of course. Berkeley) and, indeed, in London, where the company were guests of the National Theatre at the Old Vic. Now it is back in London, at the Roundhouse, but this time the trumpets are strangely muted, and it isn't wholly— though it is partly—because M Barrault is working not with his own players but with a scratch company of variable local talents. The designer, Matias, the choreo- grapher, Velerie Camille. and M Barrault himself, as director, have done their valiant best to see that the show looks the same: and the rock music, by Michel Polnareff, sounds the same. The epic conception re- mains impressive. It begins with an abor- tive book-burning, in the centre of the Open, Cruciform stage. after which the actors split into the four groups that will be in contention: the Papal and academic reactionaries the humanists, the Protest- ant extremists, and the threatening forces of imponderable adversity. The rest is based mainly on the first two books of Rabelais's great quinary. Gargantua and Pantagruel, a series of rampageous char- ades kicking off with the rollicking fete that culminates in the explosive birth of the monstrous Gargantua (born, with an immediate disregard of the conventions, through his mother's ear) and winding up with the discovery of the Oracle of the Divine Bottle, somewhere in Northern China, where we get a sort of official en- dorsement of the vivacious philosophy of 'Buvez la vie!' and 'Fay ce que vouldras' that has been proclaimed throughout. The shape of it will inevitably put you in mind of a fairly raucous pantomime in which the dialectics. interpolated as speciality turns, seem as trivialised as a discussion of ethics on the Frost Sliow.
There are peripheral references to the life and hard times of Rabelais himself— his flights from a hostile society are paralleled by Panurge's fantastic voyage— and the fable and its author are ultimately brought together when the expiring Pan- urge, who has also worked his passage as a spry symbol of the common man, mur- murs the words that legend has attributed to Rabelais on his own deathbed : 'Ring down the curtain, the farce is over, I go to seek a great perhaps.' The ruling notion, though, is to underline the parallels be- tween that repressive mediaeval society and the French scene, especially the Sor- bonne scene, of 1968: and, in some further special pleading. to make Friar John's Abbey of Thelema—from which religious bigots, scholastic pedants and ugly women are excluded—a direct forerunner of our
own century's hippy communes. We seemed to be invited to equate Panurge's voyage with an LSD trip, and, of course. no one will have much difficulty in boiling down the Rabelaisian message, as delivered here, into Do your own thing.' Even so, the contemporary relevance of the enter- prise seems curiously tenuous.
It is also true, I think, that the presenta- tion of the piece in English raises a bit of a language barrier which probably has as much to do with a feeling for words as with the meaning of words. Robert Baldick's stiffish translation is doubtless entirely faithful to the original, but there are some aspects of Rabelaisian humour as hostile to formal translation as the couplets of Moliere. though hardly for the same reason. The English may be recon- ciled to excretory jokes on lavatory walls. but when they are declaimed from a stage, the fastidiousness of the ear asserts itself. In my own maidenly case, even the Baby Gargantua's dissertion on his experiments in methods of wiping his bottom, struck me as distastefully protracted. Rabelais's joy- ous celebration of sexuality is another matter. of course, but here the present cast lack the blithe attitudes of M Barrault's own company: they are too much accus- tomed. I daresay. to the prevailing fashion in the lower reaches of our own theatre. which seems intent on bringing sex into disrepute—in line, I suppose, with the peculiarly English habit of giving all the succinct Anglo-Saxon words applicable to sexual organs and functions a pejorative colloquial meaning. Anyway, the vital Gallic touch eludes them. and Rabelais is a mixed salad that has little piquancy with- out the French dressing.
With the exception of Joe Melia (aptly mercurial as the wayward humanist, Pan- urge), and one or two cheerful young ladies of the chorus, the players capture rather less of the spirit of Rabelaisian and bacchanalian revelry than the average rugger-club binge. The spectacular effects —the giant masks. the Aristophanic birds of the Ringing Island. the strobe lighting • —are often stunning: but most of the time there is a disastrous incongruity between what is said and done and the way it is said and done. I can imagine a Japanese production of Hair might run into the same kind of trouble.
In the West End. Robert Marasco's Child's Play (Queen's) has to do with grisly, sinister and highly unlikely goings- on in a Catholic boarding school. The mystery is fraudulent, the development pretentious and the denouement ludicrous. It could do with some of the simple logic that goes into Ray Cooney and John Chapman's Move Over Mrs Markham (Vaudeville), a hugely funny farce in which, as in the Summa Theologica. every- thing follows with divine inevitability once you accept the initial premise—which, in this case, is that three different couples should all arrange illicit assignations, un- known to each other. in the same flat on the same evening, Tony Britton, Moira Lister, Terence Alexander. Cicely Court- neidge and others play it adroitly.
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