Theatre
All at sea
Kenneth Hurren
Noah by Andre Obey (Chichester Festival Theatre) Confusions by Alan Ayckbourn (Apollo)
Though Andre Obey's play, Noah, was evidently written originally (in 1928) as a group acting exercise for a company that spent most of its time putting on shows in French villages, it seems an eccentrically unlikely choice for the summer festival in Sussex. The outer fringes of the stockbroker belt and theatre buffs among the neighbourhood gentry are apt to think of themselves as a touch more sophisticated than the Gallic peasantry, and this is a play about the Noah: Genesis VI-IX, the father of mankind, animal man and boatbuilder, the Man But For Whom. The intellectual level is roughly that of Godspell, the dialogue—at least in the present English version by Arthur Wilmurt--a stilted mix of the archaic and the contemporary, while the animals just grunt and snuffle and huff-puff, and look cuddly as though they should be on ice in Disney on Parade.
There is a whimsical sentence among the programme notes observing that Obey wrote the piece 'when mankind's belief in its destiny had been shaken by the first world war', which carries the implication that Noah somehow restored it, and that we should look around in it for some relevance to our own world. Obey himself declared frankly that he 'did not bother with any idea of a thesis, of symbolism or of pointing a moral', which is about right—he didn't, except possibly in supporting the rather dubious biblical proposition that blind faith is better than self-help. Michel St Denis, who was in the original French group and who directed the London effort, contended that 'it gave life and reality to a story which is regarded as a legend', but it is hard to see how it is to be regarded as anything else, along with Adam's rib and Lot's wife, the well-known pillar of salt. Obey looked back and turned into a pillar of sugar.
He concerns himself largely with the virtues and sunny nature of his hero, and with his cosy chats with God. There are family squabbles, of course, as there were bound to be, what with the rain and the inescapably close quarters and too many pets around the place, and the dramatic core of the play, if that is not pitching it a bit strong, is a dispute between Noah and one of his sons, Ham, who takes the view that they shouldn't just sit there drifting but should do something to help themselves, such as fitting out the Ark with a rudder. Noah's faith is vindicated to the hilt when the Ark lands up on Ararat with a great rainbow in the sky, whereat all the animals and the racially assorted sons (that's Mrs Noah's business and a lady has a right to her secrets), and the wives who had made luckier marriages than they could have guessed, scamper off down the mountain to populate the world again. Noah himself, in the old version, planted a vineyard and got drunk out of his mind, but Obey left it out.
As for what he put in, well, you probably won't remember the confrontation between Noah and Ham from your bible studies, but there is little stuff of that order to invigorate the chronicle, and Gordon Jackson—who plays Noah—doesn't have anything as lively as a drunk scene to work on. He is allowed to keep his Scots accent, though, and is spared the business of looking Noah's age (which was upwards of 500) which might have disconcerted admirers of his performance as Hudson in Upstairs Downstairs. I cannot reassure them to the extent of saying that he looks much like a butler, although he does project rather the attitude of the man he models in the advertisement asking us to put our faith, if not in God, at least in the Trustee Savings Bank.
The device of having the heads picked out of the darkness by a spotlight and chattering only when illuminated is amiably employed by Alan Ayckbourn in one of the five playlets that make up his Confusions. His notion-is to eavesdrop on the conversations at two different tables in the same restaurant, allowing each conversation to be heard only when it is audible to the waiter moving between the two tables, so that we learn, piecemeal, of the affair involving the wife at one table and the husband at the other. The rest of the items are less ingenious, and although one of them—an episode at a village fête where the details of a scandalous interlude involving the organiser and honorary tealady are inadvertently broadcast over the loudspeakers— is hilariously farcical, and all are splendidly performed by Pauline Collins, Sheila Gish, John Alderton, Derek Fowlds and James Cossins, the evening, by Ayckbourn standards, is unsatisfyingly insubstantial. ,
Previous page
