Myths in the Living Room
By DAVID PRYCE-JONES The Lover and The Dwarfs. (Arts.)—Power of Persuasion. (Garrick.) —What Goes Up . . . (Theatre Royal, Strat- ford, E.)—So Much to Remember. (Vaudeville.)
AT his best Mr. Pinter is the impresario of mood, of the ambivalence of everything in life. One is 4 • able to inspect both sides of the question and then two sides of both sides. At his worst Mr. Pinter is a vulgariser of ques- tions of metaphysical philosophy. This double bill is something of an evening adult educational class: Mr. Beckett-Pinter is debating with Pro- fessor Pin ter-Joad.
A cheerful modern interior introduces The Lover. The husband, leaving for his work in the city, asks, 'Will your lover be coming today?' On returning, he notices that his wife is wearing the high-heeled shoes reserved for the lover; that the blind is crooked. They discuss the lover with the usual modern hygiene in such matters. `You're not suggesting I'm jealous.' Good God, no, I'd never stoop to that.' The following day the lover comes again, and he proves to be the husband in a change of clothes. They enact a sexual fantasy, quarrel, part, and so .enable the husband to continue the game on his supposed return from the office. Finally, husband and lover fuse together in a love-making under the living- room table.
The play is closely written, but the discipline of the performance comes from Vivien Mer- chant. She is at once the symbol and fulfilment of licit and illicit sex; and also the uncertain partner of a neurotic, possibly maniac, husband whom Scott Forbes manages to illustrate as clearly as a study in a psychiatrist's case-book. Successful sex relationships, we are made to under- stand, need to be reactivated, and in marriage this calls for imaginative reconstructions of con- quest. Husband and wife invent fantastic new per- sonalities for themselves in order to prevent real new personalities catching hold of them unawares and breaking up their lives. They prefer to ad- just their sanity instead.
After such a realistic reading, of the play, it is more interesting to see it as an exposition of the most gripping of all commuter-myths, that no sooner are the suburban husbands off to their offices than their wives turn hell-bent to adultery. The shoes really are changed; the blinds really pulled down;' the ranks of lovers admitted. Trouble has been taken to make the play of this myth accurate: the husband correctly visits a whore between trains, for instance. Some points still need scholarly elucidation. Why is his brief- case kept in the same cupboard as the sexy shoes• and the primitive tom-tom? Elia this will no doubt be cleared up by some thirty-fifth century Robert Graves in his monumental compendium of early suburban myths, The White Housewife.
No such fun can be derived from The Dwarfs. First of all, the language: Pinter-Joad is hard at us with such poised questions as, 'The point is, who are you?' or `Do you believe in God?' But the lecture about the meaning of reality and the deceptiveness of appearances is broken by intermittent reflections about some dwarfs which one of the characters imagines in the yard. He offers them a dreadful little prosy posy from time to time. Then he returns to settle his feelings towards his two friends, and to provoke a row between them. The Dwarfs, first imagined ten years ago, it seems, should have a talk with their cousins The Vodi and with Peter Pan and Perhaps they'll leave us and Mr. Pinter alone.
Somewhere in that great classic The White Housewife there will be a passage about happy domestic couples whose existence is burst apart by the intrusion of a criminal who terrorises them but nevertheless comes to be accepted to some degree. The thriller-comedy is a genre which should prove baffling enough to any future historian. Power of Persuasion is a variant of this theme. The provincial German clerk is ask- ing his wife, 'Why aren't you knitting?' when a thug appears outside' their third-floor window. He.proves to be Anthony Quayle in an old lag's sweater and bowler. His intention is to put some order in the town, on the boss's instructions, and there can be 'No order without chaos.' John Mills and Joyce Redman are scared by the apparition, but allow the gangster to set up his headquarters in their demure flat. Ask no ques- tions, get some of the spoils, is their motto.
Since might appears so invincibly right, the little clerk follows the gangster's example. 'You've enriched my life,' he says, taking a lesson how to rip a man's stomach up. But one unnecessary act of violence that night in the bus depot has disgusted the gangster, so that the play reaches its climax with a do-it-yourself putsch. The clerk puts on the black-leather jacket of power, takes the flick-knife of death, finds the gift of the gab by making a short-list of victims, and so reaches his totalitarian apotheosis, seated high above his wife and the gangster, now prostrate before him.
This political parable is very clear in line, very articulate, and one notices in the programme notes that the author, Gert Hof- man, read philosophy at Leipzig University. Perhaps Anthony Quayle and John Mills, direct- ing themselves, could have made their point less emphatically. There is as much tiptoe about John Mills as there is chest-expander about Anthony Quayle, and the farce and the violence therefore tend to be guyed. But it should shake down into something effective.
What goes up in Stratford could perfectly well come down at the Whitehall. One under- estimates the staying power of that stringy old turkey, the British musical. This is the bird served in the usual way, with a few literary trimmings, `Ed need a day, Sorting through Roget,' and a faint social after-flavour, that there's more to progress than lots of new blocks of flats. The old pub on the corner stands in the way of the demolition workers as the last oasis of liberty and the community way of life. After much beer and intrigue, a dodge is found to save it, which backfires half the cast into heaven. But by then schmaltz has already treaded everything over. Talent is observable only in John Bury's set of pub and demolition site, and in Anna Starkey's Sally, a gingery tigress in a green dress. She has the unique advantage here of being able to sing consistently in tune.
At the Establishment, Fenella Fielding made Maudie Marlowe's long theatrical career seem like the hard work it must have been. There is more ease about it now, expanded with more to remember from the scrapbooks, but it still sounds like people having good ideas and not doing too much about them.
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