Theatre
Mushroom Soup
By BAMBER GASCOIGNE The Fire-Raisers. (Royal Court.) — Macbeth. (Old Vic.) From various remarks it seems clear already that the man is an arsonist, but Biedermann re- assures himself by asking the direct question : 'You aren't an arsonist, are you?' The man laughs. And Biedermann laughs. Soon the man has been joined by a colleague, and together they have filled the attic with petrol drums. They never con- ceal or deny what they are doing, and at one point they even get Biedermann to help them with the detonating fuse; but the truth, quite baldly stated, sounds so preposterous that Biedermann can only try to laugh it off as a joke. As the facts become more and More undeniable he tries harder and harder to make friends with the couple. Finally, as a token of his confidence, he lends them some matches. They burn the house down.
The play reads excellently, but though well worth seeing, it is less successful in the theatre than I had hoped. I don't think the fault lies with this Royal Court production (though it makes one fatal blunder, of which more later). Lindsay Anderson's direction is crisp, and there is an ex- cellent set by Alan Tagg. In a good cast Colin Blakely is outstanding as the wrestler, whom he plays as a bullet-headed thug from Glasgow; and Alfred Marks's Biedermann, made up to look singularly like Mr. Macmillan, is stern and weak, pompous and sociable, in exactly the right pro- portions. Dudley Moore has written suitably mock-heroic music for a chorus of firemen, who comment on the action and who annoy Bieder- mann by saying 'Woe' to his face and by repeating it three times.
The fault seems to be in the play itself. In the theatre it makes its points too obviously and too often. It says a considerable amount about ap- peasement, but it says it, in effect, crudely, because the drama itself is not powerful or funny enough to carry the parable; the plums of meaning that the author has stuck in are so immediately visible that we can pluck them out again without really sampling his pudding. This is a familiar danger With this type of drama. Another example of it is the middle act of Diirrenmatt's The Visit. That play has the best first act devised for many years, with the town awaiting the arrival of the richest' woman in the world, and an excellent last act in which the schoolmaster pleads against the-by now inevitable murder. But it is the middle act which contains the play's real meaning, and this act is a failure. The old lady has promised the towns- people a fortune if they kill the man who wronged her. They refuse her offer, but start buying goods on credit. The point is made with the very first purchase; but in trying to emphasise it Dfirrenmatt merely indulges in repetition.
The fault in The Fire-Raisers is very similar. The first scenes, in which the wrestler secures his position in the household, are dramatic; but once he has become an unmistakable arsonist, and his host an unmistakable appeaser, the interest flags. Meanwhile the sub-plot, which is about a sick employee of Biedermann's and is meant to sug- gest his basic lack of humanity, is so bleakly point- ful that it seems little more than significance by shorthand.
One very strong protest needs to be made against this particular production. It only crops up in the last few seconds, when Lindsay Ander- son projects a nuclear mushroom behind the flames of Biedermann's house; but this one image reflects back over the whole parable, and is a monstrously dishonest distortion of the play's meaning. The deception is furthered by putting 'The Place: Europe. The Time: Today' in the programme, though the published version gives no such details; and it is made possible only by suppressing the entire second part of the play, a long epilogue. This epilogue follows Biedermann to Hell, where he is called upon to justify himself. It contains more trenchant satire of bourgeois and materialist morality than the first part, and it relates the play much more closely to the rise of the Nazis and to Germany's astounding economic recovery since the war. Perhaps. muses the chorus at the end, when one considers the gleaming new cities everything was for the best after all.
On the artistic level if Anderson's nuclear finale is taken seriously, it must make the play seem either dishonest or merely unintelligent. The parable bears no relation to the modern debate about defence and the deterrent, whereas it mir- rors exactly (anti, I now feel, almost too glibly) the rise of the Nazis. The arsonists' entry into the house by intimidation, Biedermann's efforts to befriend them as soon as he knows that they are definitely dangerous, even the intellectual who has joined the fire-raisers in order to improve the world—these and many other touches belong to Germany between the wars. On the political level, the distortion seems even more indefensible. Art should be politiCal, in the broadest sense of the word, but to make a case by distorting half an author's work is the type of trick which artists usually associate with politicians.
Macbeth is doing foul deeds at the Old Vic in one of the ugliest sets that I have seen for some time. It consists of heavy painted slabs arranged in shapes which conjure up something between the hold of a galleon and some Mexican Stone- henge. But even without this millstone the pro- duction would, I think, be heavy and dark. It be- gins with a spooky presentation of the witches, accompanied for some reason by the sounds of an air-raid. From then on, since the set is incap- able of suggesting daylight, almost every scene seems to take place at the very witching hour of night. Maurice Denham speaks Macbeth's last great speech magnificently, but his performance lacks a certain ferocity. Maxine Audley's Lady Macbeth, icily severe, is on a more Shakespearean scale.
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