Theatre
Comings and goings
Kenneth Hurren
!Cannot say that my eagerness to visit Australia has been perceptibly encouraged by The .Removalists, a play by David Wil liamson which has turned up at the Royal Court following its acclaim as "the best Australian Stage play of 1972" by the critics in its native land, but I'm grateful to it for the warning, and if I ever do get Down Under I'll be sure not to do anything to irritate the local Police. Williamson's piece features only a couple of small-town cops — a veteran sergeant, generally disgruntled because his patch affords no opportunities for lucrative corruption, and a young recruit, fresh from the training college — but we are clearly being Invited to view their behaviour as fairly representative of a force in Which Barlow would be thought a bit of a milquetoast. The two officers on hand are called to assist a young woman in Moving her belongings from the house of the husband she is leaving, and leaving with every good reason, since she is subjected to Indignities that might be considered excessive by any girl outside an apache act and has the bruises to prove it. Nevertheless the husband has a valid point of view by his lights — which include a modi cum of cheerful brutality — and he is bewildered and notably put out when the little woman brings the law along. A husky, harddrinking manual worker with not Much upstairs, and not much of anything really, apart from some sort of obsession with his sexual Prowess, he naturally remonstrates with his wife's uniformed sup Porters. "Last night," he observes to the sergeant, to emphasise the reasonableness of his dissent, ' she came five times in just one grapple." It is plain that he re gards her subsequent complaint about a couple of bruises as mere ly captious; even had he broken her pelvis, I felt he would still be inclined to believe that her proper response should have been grati tude. The sergeant doesn't altogether see it that way (he has a few virility hang-ups of his own),
, and for most of the rest of the Play the outraged, protesting and
unquenchably abusive husband is handcuffed to the wall and murderously beaten-up, an activity in ,which the initially appalled recruit eventually and disastrously joins his sergeant.
At this point a certain amount of rather gruesome comedy is introduced (there is an especially hilarious moment when the younger officer, looking at their crumpled, bloodied victim and being convinced that they have killed him, suggests that they might "make it look like suicide "), but I'm sure Williamson was digressing. His real purpose is probably to say something terribly profound about the Australian way of life and the relationship between sex and violence, and it is obviously sheer bad luck that it all comes over as a kind of parody of a ' B ' grade motion-picture made for the yob trade. Mark McManus, as the mentally retarded husband, takes his punishment with rare fortitude, and Ed Devereaux and Struan Rodger as the upholders of 'law and order seem so horribly authentic that, in their part of the world, I doubt if anyone would think to quibble about a parking fine unless he were wearing a protector.
How different it is, how very different from the home life of the
Bronte family, which is portrayed
at the Westminster in Glasstown, a play by Noel Robinson which
focuses more closely than is usual in the dramatised parsonage upon the untidy life-style and fantasies of Branwell — with the sugges tion, even, that his sisters' famous fiction derived its inspiration, at least in part, from him. The play tends to be Brontosaurean in concept and pace but holds the atten tion, and there are acceptable performances from Anne Stallybrass (Charlotte), Angela Down (Emily) and Robert Powell (Branwell).
Short on space this week, I can do no more than briefly commend the beautiful and touching performances of Isabel Dean and Margaret Ashcroft in Marriages, William Trevor's play at the Kongs Head, Islington, in which a man's mistress and widow explore their conflicting griefs: a trite piece, but more than redeemed by the playing.
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