REVIEW
OF THE ARTS
Theatre
Poet and peasant and nuts
Kenneth Hurren
The Fool by Edward Bond (Royal Court) A Month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Ariadne Nicolaeff (Albery) IPi-Tombi by Bertha Egnos, lyrics by Gail Lakier (Her Majesty's) Edward Bond's last play, Bingo, , was about William Shakespeare, the Stratford-upon-Avon properfY-owner whose relationship to the Poet-dramatist of the same name caused the playwright some distressing difficulties of rationalisation, largely because he seemed unaware that most of the 'facts' he was trying to reconcile were often no more than legends and suppositions. The central and eponymous character in The Fool is another literary man, John Clare, who may be rather less well-known, but about whom the recorded facts are not much, if at all, in dispute. Even so, I'm not sure that Bond, in adding them up, has arrived at a Persuasively correct answer. Clare, if I may spare the unscholarly a visit to their encyclopaedias, lived from 1793 to 1864. The son of a 1'4orthamptonshire farmhand, he as Pot to work on the land himself at the age of six or seven and thus received very little formal education. Nevertheless, as a Ydling man, he was constantly scribbling away, and at twentyseven achieved the publication of a book of poems that took him to London and brought him some
'Peasant popularity as the Peasant poet'. It didn't last,
thetigh. He was soon back to farming, married to a farmer's daughter who bore him seven children. Though evidently supPorted to some extent by patrons Who remained keen on his work, his subsequent volumes of poetry were unsold in large numbers. In his forties he became subject to delusions. The last twenty-three years of his life were spent in a lunatic asylum, a misfortune that Bond — always painfully attracted to themes touching on the discouraging experience of the artist in a commercial society — is inclined to attribute to the insensitivity of money to genius, the enclosure of common land, the inordinate dif ferences in the living standards of the honest poor and the villainous rich, the generally woeful frustrations and privations suffered by the early-nineteenth-century peasantry, and perhaps also to Clare's own reprehensible neglect of these pressing social issues when, as a young man, he was more interested in girls.
The first half of the play, oddly, is not especially concerned with Clare at all, and if it were not for the fact that the role is seen to be played by Tom Courtenay, the leading actor of the show, it would be hard to guess by the interval that the rest of the piece is to focus on him. Up to that point he is just one of a group of poverty-stricken rustics, first encountered performing a play — not much less tiresome than the 'Pyramus and Thisbe' debacle in A Midsummer Night's Dream — for the entertainment of the nobility at Christmas. Their later activities are rather less agreeable, culminating brutally in an assault — explained, if not excused, by the desperation of their poverty — upon an elderly and pitifully defenceless clergyman, whom they strip of his clothes and possessions and come close to taking the skin from his back, having been incensed by its softness, the result of the easy living he has enjoyed, they allege, at their expense. Clare himself is not party to this unsavoury exploit (he is off
somewhere in pursuit of a girl) and thus, fortunately, misses being arrested. One of the perpetrators — of whom it is frequently said that "he wouldn't hurt a fly," though his demeanour, as interpreted by Nigel Terry, is spectacularly at odds with this assessment—is hanged; the rest are joyed to have their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.
Altogether we are given a pretty grim picture of the plight of the rural poor, but whether it is a strong contributory factor to the poet's later derangement is dubious, and if this is, indeed, the inference that Bond intends us to draw, he does not improve the case by introducing at a later stage poor Mary Lamb, who also winds up in the madhouse. Clare runs into the Lambs in London and is seen chatting with them and other fashionable folk in Hyde Park where the sporting gentry are gathered, coincidentally, to watch a prize-fight — evidently significantly, but not, to my mind, terribly relevantly in regard to our understanding of Clare. There are, in fact, two plays concurrently in progress — one a portrait of the character and life of a specific individual, the other a gendalised landscape of his age — but they do not so much blend with as disappear into each other; and the evening, despite its moments of telling theatricality, is exasperatingly unsatisfactory. Tom Courtenay has a hard time with Clare, getting little assistance from the lines to suggest either his developing mental instability or his literary worth; ironically enough, in both writing and performance, it is the characters in the upper reaches of the social scale — the local peer played by Nicholas Selby, the parson by John Normington, and the poet's London benefactors by Bill Fraser and Isabel Dean — who are the most memorable.
Toby Robertson's production of A Month in the Country (Turgenev's play set in rural Russia in approximately the same period), upon which I remarked at some length when it was first seen at Chichester (The Spectator, August 10, 1974), has been brought to the Albery by the Prospect Theatre Company. The performances of Dorothy Tutin and Derek Jacobi (as the infatuated Natalya and her languid admirer, Rakitin) have developed strikingly and the beautiful interplay in the scenes between them is as pleasurable to watch as any acting on the current London stage. Timothy West's doctor — an obligatory character in all nineteenth-century Russian plays laid in country mansions — is a further asset; but the cast changes among the subsidiary personnel are not always for the better: the little-girl squeak affected by Jane Lapotaire as Natalya's ward does not altogether compensate for the maturity of her appearance, and Michael Howarth,
as the handsome tutor to whom the lady of the house is so absurdly in thrall, is so concerned to project the energetic and exuberant youthfulness of the character that I feared he might come on skipping rope.
The Johannesburg show, Ipi-Tombi — all impenetrable tribal chanting and dancing refined into choreography — is an eyebrowlifting affair devoted to the theme of how to be happy though poor and black in South Africa.
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