Theatre
Flattering Unctions
By ALAN BRIEN Out of this World. (Phoenix.)—The Bride Comes Back. (Vaude- ville.)—The Life of the Party. (Lyric.)— The Maimed. (Royal Court, Sunday.) - Trials by Logue. (Royal Court.) FIVE evenings, or in my case parts of evenings, at the theatre and yet what intelligence or in- formation or entertainment is offered in reward for those cramped hours in the darkness? Many of my critical colleagues have exhausted their passionate expletives in denouncing these pro- ductions. Each play is the worst ever foisted on the public. Each experience is the most agonising for twenty years. Critics, who are paid for accept- ing free seats which others would theoretically work overtime to afford, should have a cushy and enviable existence. But managements today have made criticism a duty and a burden—it is new literary ditch-digging and intellectual hard labour. Abuse is not enough. Indignation is not all. If we parasites on the body of the drama find that the blood is gettisig thinner and the skin is getting thicker, we cmust not simply die of anaemia in a dozen despairing attitudes.
I have been depressed by the latest mauvais mot reported back from Brendan Behan in New York. 'Critics are like eunuchs in a harem,' he complains. 'They know how to do it, they see it done every night, but they can't do it them- selves.' (Dryden? Shaw? Granville Barker? Dar- lington? Lindsay Anderson?) Behan may be right: at least we should be able to appreciate what those financiers, authors, directors, actors and stagehands think will be pleasurable to their imagined audiences. Out of this World, an Englished version of a continental farce now vanished, was presumably intending to release middle-class tensions about money-making and spouse-seducing by acting them out in a Peter Pan world of whimsical fantasy. The complaisant millionaire, with the eminently accessible wife, intended to build his block of flats on a derelict cemetery. A delegation of the dead materialised to frustrate him, but their representative fell in love with the wife.
Traditional religion, with its tediously impres- sive rituals and its disturbingly complex theo- logy, is too important and too ethereal to have much meaning in a businessman's view of life. Taken seriously it would be boring, taken criti- cally it would be shocking. But spiritualism and grey magic with their magic bowls and acrobatic furniture are part of his pagan philosophy of luck and chance and coincidence. Spookiness still gives him a comfortable thrill and a sense of treading on the periphery of a genuine tabu. Both Out of this World and The Bride Comes Back appeal to the irrationalism and fear of logic which are inherent in an affluent society based on a fairy-gold standard.
It is important to remember that the theatre- going public in Britain is a tiny minority. Those who support the West End theatres are mainly those whose life is magnetised by power—and power equals money equals sex. Woman is the dividend owed by natural law to the expense- account warrior. Robertson Hare in The Bride Comes Back is the epitome of the tiny city manni- kin endlessly propositioned by enormous dream blondes in a cartoon world. Scrawny, nervous, henpecked, with a face like an old man's bicep, he is the parody of the Puritan conscience. Once he was only half of the office-sheik's image—the super-ego bustled into intrigues at the coat-tails of Alfred Drayton's libido. (`The one is "belch," the other "beg pardon",' as Kenneth Tynan ob- served.) Now be is alone—the sorriest sex-symbol In existence—any husband must think himself more attractive than that, any wife can happily watch such pseudo-infidelity with amusement. But how about the cheerful cuckold in Out of this World? He atones for his lack of sexual Prosperity by his abundance of financial virility. And his rival from beyond the grave is justifi- ably made impotent by the intervention of a trio of ghosts. Once again adultery is made painless for after-dinner gigglers while still retaining all the outward naughtiness of a saloon-bar joke.
It is not only the middle class whose prejudices are so tediously flattered in the theatres of their choice. The New Lefties, the hobohemians, the Encore subscribers are also presumed to be will- Ing to accept shoddy construction and tired Writing so long as they sell the fashionable politi- cal line and reflect the modishly messy morals. Ray Mathew's The Life of the Party could only have been staged under the illusion that we pro- gressive males see ourselves as defiant, witty, Irresistible layabouts who attract women and Toney by right of our untamed genius. Here is hie portrayed as one long blurred binge of beer, SeX and talk like a progressive reform school in State of mutiny. Unfortunately even those who Warm to this picture of themselves must have been put off by the aggressively bad acting and the belligerently pretentious dialogue.
The Royal Court's Sunday night play again could only have earned its production by the consciousness that it was an anti-colour bar tract written by a White South African. You surely don't have to be a Fascist beast to get bored by a narrative technique which makes such elemen- tary mistakes as showing you scenes and then r :L°I.cing you to listen to them being described Immediately afterwards, by a production of Paralysing slowness where one actor mimes open- ing an invisible door and another walks straight ?trough it, by dialogue which leaps from 'stolen 'suit is sweetest' to 'the bottom has dropped out of my world.'
Trials by Logue is at least worlds above the other four clumsy exercises in ingratiation. But underneath both halves of the evening lies the assumption that we must approve the plays be- cause we agree with the opinions which begot the. In. Here the blandishments eventually wear t, tun, too, because the crudity of the thinking and the sheer perversity of the language presume too much on our sympathy. (Also 1, for one, was hardly much flattered to find Cob and Leach ending with the patronising chorus line—'We'll have to make do with the Royal Court.') Antigone had every promise of success as a politi- cal drama about the moral choice between the side oftomorrow's destiny and today's humanity. inside nside a metallic funnel with history's endless Viral beaten into its sides, under a suffocating arc lamp which flared Mary Ure's hair to acety- ,erte flame, surrounded by thugs in metal masks, uals dialogue about the logic of revolution could have been electrifying. But the final effect was a palimpsest of Brecht and Koestler and Sartre with the words and the feelings running together into theatrical hieroglyphics. There were many incidental moments hammered hot on the anvil, but phrases like 'Some people think your mouth makes cream—let them eat the butter from your nose' cannot help sounding like parody transla- tions from Serbo-Croat. When they are inter- mixed with clichés like 'half-saw, half-felt' and `he's dead, dead, dead,' especially with Mary Ure stamping her girlish foot and George Rose roar- ing in painfully hollow anger, then the drama begins to disintegrate. Cob and Leach is not much different from the first time it was pro- duced on a Sunday night—heavy-handed, Unity panto roistering which thinks it is far more daring than it is. To expect to shock us now with the word 'arse' which is nightly trilled at Drury Lane and then to substitute a placard marked 'cen- sored' each time is to treat the audience as schoolboys.
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