Arts
Ways and means
Giles Gordon •
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Half Moon)
Rococo (ICA)
Cats (New London) •
As socialist doctrine, Stephen Lowe's dramatisation of Robert Tressell's 1906 novel about the lives of painters and decoraters in Hastings, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (nearly 600 pages in my paperback edition), is more rudimen- tary and banal than fundamental. Even Ian Mikardo left at the interval on press night. It's a wasted opportunity not because to re- main steadfast and true to one's beliefs and ideals is other than honourable but that to display the closed mind which Mr Lowe besports in his aggressive programme note is to deny history, progress, even what socialism has achieved. Mr Lowe's pro- blem, though I suspect he was unaware of it, was whether faithfully to reproduce the book, as if in a time capsule, or to interpret it for the present, look at its characters in the light of what happened this century to this country. Mr Lowe opts for a middle course, introducing anachronisms into the dialogue but no sense of historical or political perspective, The evening is nos- talgic or nothing.
The play is enjoyable in the way that Ar- nold Wesker's early plays are hypnotic, and David Storey's: men and women are shown at work. Tressell's house painters spend the evening painting and papering the Half Moon Theatre. David Fielder as Owen (Tressell), the artist and thinker among them, shows an eager apprentice how to ap- ply gold leaf to a mural, to breathe on it, talk to it. It's a stirring moment. Owen is more successful there than in trying to per- suade his fellow workers to think for themselves, to vote [LP, although his lesson in economics and capitalism with the aid of a slice or two of bread and some pennies is well done. Unfortunately John Adams's direction allows the actors, who play various parts, to lapse into caricature when essaying foremen and bosses.
At the start of Rococo, a girl in a white shift announces that the paved garden in which she stands, stock still, is hers. Enter to her, after much loud taped music, six grotesquely dressed 18th-century revellers, three of each sex, more or less. They look, even when two of the men strip off and prance around displaying their all, straight (well, hardly that) from Beardsley's draw- ings for The Rape of the Lock. The tower- ing periwigs worn by all sexes are like loofahs, topiary, candyfloss. The girl (the parts played by the actors aren't identified, so I cannot name her) is drawn into the lazy, self-indulgent, deprived fete champetre. The music (by Alan Brown) is sensuous and sinister, the pink and green lighting (by Ian Gugan) dusky, the choreography -- by the Rational Theatre Company who mount the marshmallow show — melancholy and vapid. One of the naked actors appears, like Oskar in The Tin Drum, from under the gargantuan-hooped dress of an actress, presumably having pleasured himself but not her, though who in the audience could know? Two of the ac- tresses fight each other with fans, and the one who is vanquished displays her but- tocks to the audience for many minutes. The girl of the garden finally reclaims it for herself after charmingly smashing a lus- cious water melon into the face of another.
Rococo is scripted by Peter Godfrey, directed by Andy Wilson, designed by Sandy Powell (the programme curiously lists her telephone number, and of others associated with the production). The show is meant to be about not deprivation but depravity. It's a kind of aesthete's version of Steven Berkoff's view of life, menacing and vacuous, pretentious and humourless. It's anti-mind but what, to me, condemns it is that those who mounted it don't seem to understand that style, even the style of rococo, is not merely something you slap on top of something else, like chocolate sauce on steam pudding.
The serious actor who isn't likely to be invited to play Lear, or even the Fool (but no doubt Messrs Gambon and Sher were surprised to be asked) and who has done useful mercenary service may just achieve his hour of glory in a one-man show if it catches on. Recently a number of dead poets have trodden the boards to explain themselves, the latest being Gerard Manley Hopkins. Peter Gale has devised his own play, sensibly directed by Michael Huck s, about the inventor of sprung rythm, author of 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' and 'The Windhover', friend of Bridges, Jesuitical convert to Cardinal Newman's Roman Catholicism. Mr Gale has only one disadvantage: an unmemorable, light voice of apparently narrow range. It's not a tim- bre the listener records in his mind's ear even an hour after the performance.
But that apart, the way in which the actor — with the aid of but two tables and a few props — speeds through Hopkins's modest, searching life is, if you already have an in-
terest in and some knowledge of the poet, most affecting. Hopkins expresses approval of marriage, and the fact that he's married to God is, in Mr Gale's performance, natural and unembarrassing. He recites chunks of the poems which on the page often seem like gilded butterflies enmeshed in spiders' webs and easily prises from them much of their meaning as well as their music. As the poet becomes weary and unwell towards the end of his life, Mr Gale's eyes — previously dancing with life's joys — grow tired. They really dim. The fires smoulder, die.
Cats may still — after more than two years — be the most sought after ticket in London, though a lady in the row in front of me the other day was on her eighth visit, and goes again in a couple of months. It's even better than it was originally, the best danced and sung show in town. It's improv- ed, which I hadn't thought possible, not least in the performance of Angela Richards as Grizabella, the mangy, has-been cat, She plays it as if the character is intrinsic to the musical, not as a guest star spot. Thus 'Memory' in her poignant, throw-away ren- dition cannot fail to bring tears trickling down the cheeks. John Napier's street-alley set is as pristinely tatty as ever; Gillian Lynne's choreography as vibrant as anything America could achieve, and with more character; Andrew Lloyd Webber's music gets under the skin and fur and stays there; Trevor Nunn's direction is the most theatrical thing even he has done. The secret, I suspect, is that every single member of the cast, even on Saturday matinee, ex- udes the greatest professionalism, wit, grace, pleasure. Film or television couldn't begin to approximate the experience that is Cats. Truly, it is one of the wonders of the world.
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