CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
"Bartholomew Fair." By Ben Jonson. (Old Vic.) " Tuts Way to the Fayre " says a large notice which is visible throughout the opening scenes; and at the sight of the arch, archaic spelling dread premonitions of hey-nonny-nonny cast a chill upon us and we seem to hear, far off, the gruesome tinkle of musical braces as the Morris dancers limber up in the wings. But we need not have worried. There is nothing precious about the junketings at Smithfield. In a production which can fairly be described as a tour de force Mr. 'George Devine has brought to life a seedy, gaudy, violent, vulgar microcosm in which the booths and tents, the knaves and the gulls are, by their affinity to the fairgrounds of today, easily established as variations on eternal verities. The characters and situations, taken singly, amount to very little and tend to be trite ; but when, like the ingredients of a Christmas pudding, they are all thrown into the capacious basin of the fair and stirred violently together, the turgid, ebullient amalgam is savoury and satisfying.
The plot—it is really a tissue of sub-plots, in the integration of which the author displays only a desultory interest—owes more to Mr. Roger Livesey than to any other individual actor ; his Justice Overdo, a snooper in the tradition of Haroun al Raschid, is a richly comic performance and somehow imposes an air of cohesion on the rather inconsequent goings on. Mr. Robert Eddison, as an unworldly fop from the bucolic heights of Harrow, is not less good ; his folly has a sort of gay and luminous quality, a touch, almost, of the Quixotic, which sets it off to excellent effect against the drab, harsh background of the tricksters who prey upon him with con- temptuous ease. Mr. Alec Clunes does very well indeed as his querulous servant, Mr. William Devlin manages admirably the equivocal swagger of a horse-toper and Miss Ursula Jeans, Miss Dorothy Tutin and Miss Pauline Jameson make the most of lesser opportunities. Finally, Miss Nuna Davey contrives to epitomise in the character of Ursula (a Pig Woman) the gross and sleazy ambience
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