Theatre
Despatches from the Front Line
By ALAN BRIEN A ONE-NIGHT stand at an experi- mental Sunday theatre club, Each His Own Wilderness sounds immediately as if it were going to be a scrawny, woolly, falsetto charade with more symbols than ideas, half heart-burn and half belly-ache. In- stead it is a bawdy, brawling, confused eaves- dropping of a play, set right in the flabby, frightened heart of today, with a splendid grasp of contemporary idioms and idiocies.
The official party-line of the play concerns a Wrestling match between two generations of pink metropolitans. It is the sort of body-to-body battle Where neither side is certain whether the winner takes your life or your love, breaks your neck or Your heart. And the moral seems to be that the war between the sexes and the war between the ages end equally in a sort of sullen, reluctant fraternisation among the barbed wire. But to understand Mrs. Lessing's front-line reportage you have to have kept up with all the bulletins— you have to know about the siege of Tribune, the treaty of Kingsley Martin, the revolution in King Street, the charge of the AYM Brigade, the land- ing on the Trafalgar Square beach-head. You also have to be prepared to accept the uncensored despatches written in salty, uncompromising language—with the son asking his mother, 'You're not still having the change of life, are you?' with the mother summing up the bedroom histrionics of her young lover with the phrase, 'There are times when I feel I should be clapping.'
Mrs. Lessing is thirty-eight and more at ease in the plumes and gold lace of the pre-war Pro- gressive Cavaliers than in the sloppy, unheroic battledress of the post-war pacificist Pioneer Corps. Her two middle-aged committee women, political puritans but sexual playgirls, are memor- able and striking creations—oddly endearing amalgams of Beatrice Webb and. Molly Bloom. They want to refurnish and redecorate the whole world but are incapable of spring-cleaning their own confused lives. Rousingly played by Valerie Taylor and Patricia Burke, in the styles of open-air Shakegpeare and old-fashioned music hall, their intimate chats have the prickly realism of a tape recording. The men who bustle around them— the prosperous architect with all the surface charm of a successful bigamist, and the optimistic Labour backbencher, with all the basic instincts of an Old Etonian canon—are taken to the life from the signatures at the bottom of any Petition for Peace.
Mrs. Lessing's weakness as a playwright lies in the character of the Jimmy Porter type, who plays the wooden spoon that stirs up this rich, stiff, plum pudding. He is too obviously a catalogue of mannerisms and postures chosen from the works of Osborne, Amis and Braine. There is no coherence to any of his dirty, funny, extravagant tirades. He flickers from attitude to attitude like Felix the Cat in an old hand-turned film. Colin Jeavons—like all the Royal Court young players —is refreshingly ,un-actor-like. He bitches and blasphemes with ,a kind of gargling, retching con- viction that would be beyond the Oliviers and Gielguds of our stage. But as a style this is rapidly becoming as strait-jacketing as the old, sonorous rocking-horse beat of the Lyceum actor-manager. There is something both hysterical and mono- tonous about these bad-taste monologues unless they are written with more variation of feeling and imagery than Mrs. Lessing has been able to provide.
Each His Own Wilderness is half a very good play, half a very ingenious pastiche. But it is the powerful, intelligent, living work by just the sort of new writer the British theatre badly needs. Mrs. Lessing should sit down and respin her web as soon as possible. The new version should then instantly enter the Royal Court repertory over the dead body of The Sport of My Mad Mother.
The Kidders is also a play with a theme and a point and a message. Written by Donald Ogden Stewart, an early refugee from the un-American Activities Committee, it aims to show life in the mad capitalist beehive of a Middle West com- pany village. Living there is an endless gloomy- go-round of drinking, fornicating, 'boasting, worrying and horseplay. Everyone tells his neigh- bour the bitter truths of life ('I'm madly in love with your wife' and 'I don't deserve to have this job'), but gives the lines a cagey, quizzical, Bob Hope reading which allows them to be accepted as 'just kidding.'
The Kidders, according to some critics, is as ambitious as Death of a Salesman. The style, how- ever, is often as unexacting as Getting Gertie's Garter--Mr. Stewart has been a professional funny-man so long that he must dress up every statement in a comic hat. He is himself art obsessional kidder. Eventually he has nothing to oppose to the hypocrisy he condemns but a kind of bland grinning naivety. This weakness is underlined by the acting which is geared to the staccato momentum of a comedy thriller instead of the relaxed, throw-away rhythms of the satirical comedy. In Hollywood Mr. Stewart wrote screen- plays such as Philadelphia Story and Keeper of the Flame—and The Kidders cries out for the lazy juggling act of Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. At the St. Martin's everything seems much more' synthetic and* dehydrated than it really is. The American accents vary wildly (as if a British play should be full of characters who switched in one sentence from Cockney to Mummerset to BBC) and so the non-American actors behave as if they were balancing invisible billiard cues on their foreheads. The atmosphere of the transatlantic business world is painted with dollops of heavy, unsubtle, and often in- accurate local colour. (There are, for exam ple, only about five buildings in New York with more than sixty-eight floors, and none of them is on Broadway.) It is not enough to study your subject in the cinema. Mr. Stewart ought to return home and find out what capitalism can really do to its devotees before he attempts another st.ch out-of- date muck-raker.
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