THEATRE
Bile and Spleen
Jorrocks. (New.)—Three Men for Colvertotz. (Royal Court).—Volpone. (Oxford Playhouse.) ONE liver, two kidneys, three good reasons for drinking Spa water, as the French ads say; one new play, one musical, two very good reasons, as it turned out, for leaving London last week en route for the Oxford Playhouse. Frank Hauser, I hope, will spare a thought for London audiences who have had a thin time recently and kindly transfer his new Volpone to the West End.
In the meantime, London offers two pretty fair samples of the higher and the lower pap. I prefer the lower : Jorrocks is perfectly inoffensive (even on bloodsports, for your fox is a jolly good fellow and we don't get a whiff of the hunt), and seems, whether from timidity or cynicism, to have had no further end in view. The subject—collision between rival brands of small-town vulgarity, Mrs Barnington, genteel snob, bearded in her various dens by Jorrocks the grocer—is admir- ably suited to the form, vulgarity being the stuff of which musicals are made. But, though the show builds itself up two or three times for the grand, theatrical confrontation, it always funks at the last moment—someone strikes up a ballad, or the extras all softly and silently vanish away. Everything, from sets and music to Joss Ackland as our hero, is affable, competent, hopelessly literary'—derived at second-hand from Christ- mas cards conventions of prettiness, bookish notions of how funny fat men behave. Except, that is, for Paul Eddington as the go-between—a wincing, jabbed and prodded worm; and for one Pigg the huntsman, played by Peter Whitbread in a frayed pink coat with dark streams of
tobacco juice flowing like bloodstains over his chin. Mopping and mowing and uttering an occasional eldritch hunting cry, this dilapidated freak is a strange find in the midst of so much unction.
David Cregan's new play is unctuous too, in another and less prepossessing way. Three Men for Colrerion paints a merry portrait of rustic England rife with suppressed frustrations : 'Bum and tits' shrieks a tweedy lady, and I've seen you in the gents,' murmurs one religious celibate in the ear of another. The schoolmistress can't marry the vicar 'because the bloody vicar hasn't bloody asked me, and nor has any other bleeder.' and the reason not one of the bleeders asked her is that all the menfolk are very much keener on pretty, worried Ched, a visiting boy-preacher who finally jumps off the churchtower hoping, to be borne up by angels. But not before the whole village has joined in chase round and round the stage after a casket of ashes, said to possess talismanic qualities of virility and power.
The whole belongs to a school of playwriting, much favoured by the Royal Court, which we may call the New Babytalk after its predecessor, the New Brutalism. Its basis is the smug con- viction that all's not right with the world at large, a conviction nourished by the crude, woolly and
Garland Leo McKern
deeply disingenuous terms in which that world is viewed. Mr Cregan presents us with his village- ful of smirking, rosy-cheeked drolls, coyly pro- poses capsule social problems (how to be queer and Christian, is sex more real than culture), and invites us at last to share his own dim view of humanity. But this kind of unsubtle flattery will not sustain an evening: the dialogue is gauche, the prurient and quasi-religious undertones quickly pall, and the tone of clodfooted jollity was managed rather better, and certainly with less hypocrisy, by Julian Slade in the 'fifties.
And so, with very great relish, to Oxford, where Ben Jonson's bilious eye is turned on this sad world of prigs and time-servers, where unctuous- ness is the human rule, without exception or excuse, and even the justices on their bench, meting out rewards and punishments at the end of the play, prove as bland and two-faced as the next man. Leo McKern plays Volpone with the frantic concentration which, normally, only a very small baby devotes to self-expression : wheedling, coaxing, gloating, quaking, screwing up his pudgy cheeks, his whole body shrivelling with terror, or swelling visibly with greed at the thought of Celia's charms. Mr McKern would be as endearing as a fractious child, when he burrows in fright under the bedclothes or fishes for pre- sents in a passionate, squeaky whisper, except that every slightest gesture is the act of a ruthless, inflexible egotist. This ferocious amorality is awkward enough in children, unnerving in a grown man; and, set against it, is Alan Dobie's Mosca, soft-footed, silver-tongued, unobtrusively and infinitely evil. Others bustle in and out, lying, cheating, selling their souls, and all their efforts are reduced to the pathetic make-shifts of a bunch of bumbling amateurs beside this aristocrat of crime.
Mr Hauser, who directs, has wisely contented himself with clearing a space around this pair— adding a deft touch here and there, and, in spite of clumsy sets, a nice atmosphere of vicious inanity in the rouged and jewelled grotesques who make up Volpone's household. And, gleam- ing in the shadows, is yet another jewel—Leonard Rossiter s Corvino. Mr Rossiter has a dark and earthy countenance, roughly carved like the face of a turnip lantern, and animated by just such glowering passions as a turnip lantern would express if one should come to life.
HILARY SPURLING
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