Theatre
The Player Queen
By ALAN BRIEN FOR most Elizabethans, there were only four certainties—God, King, Father and Ego. Every other fixed star had suddenly begun to swim and stagger across the sky like a drunken tadpole. An expanding universe had stretched old truths until they split. So the Elizabethan author chose his beliefs as he chose his hats—because they fitted his head rather than his mind. Christopher Marlowe had one certainty—an atheist, a rebel and a homosexual, he was true only to his own ego. And his plays glow into bonfires when he breathes himself into the smoky rhetoric.
The result is that Edward II flashes off and on like a neon sign, alternately unreadable and dazzling. While it is an epicene love-story impure and simple, a sort of Romeo and Julio, it is electrifying. Marlowe has found an objective correlative behind which he can expose himself without indecency. The reunion• of the King and his queen, the brain-sick man-struck Edward and creepy-crawly tart Gaveston, is introduced with thunderous class-conscious denunciations by the cardboard peers. But their blank verse is as hollow and monotonous as a drum. Marlowe saves his insidious haunting flute and hautbois music for his two male wooers.
During the second act, while the nobles are Continually arguing each other into rebellion, with a great deal of schoolboyish squabbling, Marlowe's bonfire burns very low. His whole narrative technique becomes offhand and amateurish. Unlike Shakespeare, he does not use poetry as a substitute for scenery and stage light- ing, bolstering the sagging action with descriptive colour. He hardly even bothers to tag each rebel with a consistent attitude or a geographical location. They rush off and on the stage like men pursued by bees at a picnic. Only the riffraff, the original Edwardian 'boys, are given scenes to bring to life their motives in personal terms. (Though it is possible that the endless havering of the conspirators is a consciously underhand device to work up a royalist audience into a revo- lutionary mood through sheer frustration.) Marlowe seems to be saving himself for the inevitable, horrible end to the aflaire. Gaveston's death, stuck like a long pig on a red-hot poker, is presented as both barbaric and appropriate. The tension between the two viewpoints, between his official morality and his personal immorality, gives the torture a physical reality rarely found in the blinding of 'Gloucester or the maiming of Titus. And the final act is a triumph of double exposure. Marlowe superimposes two contra- dictory images within one frame and forces us to applaud the oxymoron. We still approve while we condemn the worm-eaten King. His tragic fall fulfils justice without mercy. Edward II, by being less than a man, is also more than a monarch. The play is a subversive masterpiece masquerad- ing as a propaganda documentary.
The amateur players from the Cambridge Marlowe Society give Edward II a rousing, con- fident, solid performance. If anything, they are rather too professionally slick at times—attempt- ing to be the characters rather than to act them. Both Gaveston and Edward give a conversational, argumentative, heavily stressed reading to some of the long amorous speeches which are written as stylised arias rather than as naturalistic soliloquies. The producer also has a tendency to overwork the radio-drama device of distributing distinctive accents among his cast to aid identifi- cation, with the result that we begin to judge the characters by how they speak, not by what they speak. But on the whole the balance between undergraduate self-display and Marto- vian egotism has been nicely kept. • Gabriel Marcel's Ariadne is the corpse of a Restoration comedy. The plot would have served as a skeleton for Dryden or Etherege. Here is a pretty, perverse wasp of a wife who paralyses her husband and his mistress in flagrante delic•to by stinging them both not with poison but with honey, not with condemnation but with under- standing. The Restoration formula would have been to treat the whole manoeuvre as a sexual gavotte full of intricate, unexpected steps which end suddenly in a farcical tableau. Their theme would be 'wouldn't-it-be-funny-if . . .' The whole point is that we don't believe a word of it. But M. Marcel has drained the wit out of the veins of the idea, and pumped them full of philosophy. He says 'isn't-it-significant-when . . .' And as we still don't believe a word of it, eventually we don't listen to a word of it.
M. Marcel is for ever attempting to unearth the logical moral from completely illogical be- haviour. The characters are always giving long, carefully phrased, literary answers to questions which not only can never be answered but can never be asked. The contrast between the appear- ance of actresses like Helen Cherry and Pauline Yates—two darkly smouldering charmers—and the thin dream-like situations they inhabit leads only to a mass neurosis in the audience. Ariadne is a library drama too bookish and pedantic for a flesh-and-blood theatre.
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