CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
"Tamburlaine the Great." By Christopher Marlowe. (Old Vic.).
WHEN one used to read this play the words were everything ; there was nothing else ; and the words, though they often caught one's admiration, did not really hold one's interest. The flow of Marlowe's language was often strong and occasionally very beauti- ful; long stretches_ of it were garish, and there were whorls arid eddies of unconscious bathos. This mixture had a sort of coltish, undisciplined vigour, and it was perhaps less from Marlowe's achievements than from a' sense of his aspirations that one principally derived enjoyment.
Now Mr. Guthrie, with an audacity which is seen to be well justified, has forced this spate of words to turn the ponderous mill- wheel of a long-neglected play. The results are surprisingly satis- factory. Tamburlaine's treacheries and triumphs have upon the ' stage the flat and vigorous trajectory of a strip cartoon, and we do not feel cheated because this picaresque melodrama has only the trappings of a tragedy. The production is spirited and ingenious and we are spared none of the horrors: "This," Mr. T. S. Eliot is reported to have said after the first night, "makes King Lear look as if it had been wfitten-by Sir James Barrie."
Apart from Tamburlaine there are virtually no characters in the long cast, which consists entirely of people who are either very bloodthirsty, very frightened or stone dead. But Miss Jill Balcon exhibits with dignity and feeling the passions and the scruples which Z,enocrate shares with later, less august versions of the gangster's moll, and Miss Margaret 'Rawlings makes abundantly clear the extreme inconvenience of the position in which Bajazeth's widow found herself. Elsewhere among the supporting players the level of competence is not, in general, up to the Old Vicjs usual standards.
Mr. Donald Wolfit's Tamburlaine is a very considerable achieve- ment, to be measured, perhaps, in terms of virtuosity rather than of greatness. With a white face, a reddish wig and a Mongoloid make-up he looked (to me) more like Miss Fay Compton playing
the Empress Dowager than a Scythian cavalryman ; and in his study of a megalomaniac the emphasis seemed to lie rather on intrigue than on action, on the dagger rather than on the sword. but there was no doubting the virulence of the megalomania, nor the sort of dark poetry which transfigured the ambitions underlying it,- nor the sadistic relish with which its fruits were enjoyed. Mr. Wolfit's performance is a tour de force, and a very enjoyable one to watch.
My only criticism of the production is that the tyrant's personal entourage ought, after he has conquered half the world, to get a little more out of it than they do. His chief of staff, I noticed, acquired a pair of sandals and a sort of peignoir after -three or four empires had been subjugated, and at one stage there was an issue of cere- monial head-dress. But most of them finished up just as they staged, looking like members of an impecunious water-polo team.
PETER FLEMING.
Previous page
