TIIEATRE
Yerksome
HILARY SPURLING
A View to the Cotntnon (Royal Court) The Mighty Reservoy (Barge Theatre at the Jeannetta Cochrane)
The Royal ,Court last week celebrated ten years of Sunday night productions by wheeling one of them out again and presenting its author, James Casey, with the first George Devine Award. There seems to be more than meets the eye to this transaction.
In the first place there is the piece itself, set in the time-honoured bed-sitter with a lavatory flushing in the wings and on stage 'a few cups and the stray bit of underwear . . . over the kitchen sink.' The cast, headed by Victor Henry playing the same sentimental, motherly youth he has been playing for the past twelve months and more, is the usual melancholy assortment of freaks and perverts and a madman. The text is run:of-the-mill madhouse stuff, the sort of thing English playwrights have traditionally had a weakness for and never been particularly good at:
' '0 let us howle, some heavy note, some deadly-dogged howle . . .
As Ravens, Schrich-owles, Bulls and Beares, We'll bell, and bawle our parts, Till yerk-some noyce have cloy'd your eares, and corasiv'd your hearts.'
Mr Casey's ear is not as good as this, but his lunatic strikes the authentic note of random gibberish : 'This consummation into nothing is a rape without a cause./Tbe foundation of all our moral laws/Put aside then your hallucina- tion/About your masturbations/ And consider then in full the pattern of your desecration,' and so on for nearly two hours. What is more, all the other characters, chatting glumly about their agonies, their stigmas, their obscurity and impotence, fall into the same doggerel vein: 'Making tea?/Put one in for me,' or ' "Why did he become a piece of botany?" "The answer is monotony."' Now it is well known that the Royal Court, while still capable of good work with authors safely dead, tends to become unbalanced, not to say unhinged, in its judgment of anything touching remotely on the modern world. Even so, Mr Casey's View to the Common is not so much a new low as a new departure. The piece sounds at times as if it had been written by an out-of-sorts computer, at times by twelve drunks in a pub. On the other hand, its themes, in so far as it can be said to have any, sug- gest close study of this company's peculiar pre- occupations in the last ten years. The whole, in short, bears all the signs of a mean joke played this time not by but on the Royal Court.
Pleasant by contrast to welcome another new playwright, Peter Terson, whose play The Mighty Reservoy is his first to be seen in London. This is a two-hander, an encoun- ter by night high on the Malvern hills between two familiar poles of contemporary romance: sturdy booted peasant and chinless office worker, Mother Nature's dubious bread-and- turnips against the lure of the plastic gnome. Throaty glug-glug of the mighty reservoir in the background, spiteful suburban villagers and the evil fumes of home-brewed rhubarb wine. Roy McAnally gives a brilliantly de- tailed performance as the seductive reservoir keeper, Tim Preece provides admirable sup- port. Mr Terson has been labelled a regional playwright but, though the piece straggles un- mercifully on the way to a macabre fake end- ing, it also suggests rather More—originality, detachment, an astute and astringent wit7-- than the modest, countrified fourth division of dramatists which that phrase implies.
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