Vintage Swine
An ideal Husband. (Strand.)—Babes in the Wood. (Palladium.)—Twang! (Shaftesbury.) ATthe Strand a second instalment of Mt. Peter IABridge's scheme unfolds. Late Wilde follows late Shaw under his management, another resplen- dent revival of a minor classic, flawed but still glittering like the Golden Bowl. Unsmiling, indo- lent women swim to and fro between pots of hydrangeas and fleshy white roses. Graceful gentlemen recline on plump grey velvet seats. All are gravely intent on casting their pearls before swine. Only, in An Ideal Husband there are no swine. Everyone, including the characters des- tined to be worsted by the plot, has his or her share of epigrams from Wilde's impartial hand. There are no bare surfaces in Anthony Holland's drawing-room—walls, tables, sofas are draped and swathed, bracelets clasp firm gloved arms, even the great chandelier has its load of lamp- shades like little beige mushrooms. And there are no bare surfaces in the conversation. Every word is placed with studiously casual deliberation. Not that the witticisms are always worth repeating for themselves : 'I like looking at geniuses and listen- ing to beautiful people.' Anyone could say that, and sound pretty silly, but in this padded tank it has a cushioned fall.
Alternatively they are all swine. If we are to judge Wilde's characters by their behaviour once the preposterous machinery of blackmail and betrayal has gone into action. they are none of them irreproachable. The best the production can do is to suggest they are all of a piece with their decor; people who allow practical housewifely foresight to ruin the lines of a crystal chandelier arc not going to be fussy when it comes to lying, deceiving and prevaricating. Mrs. Cheveley is the conventional villain of the piece but it is a tenuous line which divides her morals from her victims'. They are ruthless and dishonest, she was once a thief. History does not record the early stages of her career but presumably it began in comparative poverty; the others, protected like their furniture by a vast army of servants of whom only here and there a butler or a footman surfaces, can never have had any conceivable inducement to steal.
Margaret Lockwood, virulent in green velvet, is superbly wicked. She knows it and enjoys it; and this is a magnificent performance. But in a sense hers is the easier, or •at •least the more grateful task. The othets have to avoid the slippery descent to bathos as 111.st they may. Lord Goring is an earlier Jack Worthing and Richard Todd does him full justice: but, finding himself in the in- tolerable position of being earnest in all earnest- ness, Mr. Todd can only eye himself uneasily in the mirror. Michael Denison as Sir Robert Chiltern, victim of Mrs. Cheveley's blackmail, is required to go deadly pale halfway through Act 1 and remain so throughout. Prospective em- barrassment seems to have cast its shadow before. Mr. Denison is deadly pale from the start, which is perhaps a pity, but remembering his Algernon Moncrieff one can only feel for him in his present straits.
Dulcie Gray, on the other hand, declines alto- gether to follow Wilde's directions. Her Lady Chiltern is very far from being 'a woman of grave Greek beauty.' Plump-cheeked, pretty and rosy in her frivolous bonnet, flirting with her guests over the tea-table in Act 2, she has as much pleasure in clothes and almost as little time for hard thought as the light-headed Mabel Chiltern. To play Gertrude Chiltern, that monster of out- raged virtue; as a silly little woman who suddenly finds herself in unexpectedly deep waters, comes as near as possible to making sense out of non- sense. Wilde's attempts to yoke his musty old plot to his peculiarly original dialogue are per- functory in the extreme; only Miss Gray manages to bridge the gulf at all consistently.
The plot, of course, has its moments—notably some nifty business in Lord Goring's library with mistaken identity, awkward callers and an unseen listener. Even so, the scene is chiefly memorable.
for Cyril Wheeler as Phipps, the butler who repre- sents the dominance of form; Mr. Holland's flirtatious, wasp-waisted yellow silk lampshades; and the passing through of Roger Livesey as Lord Caversham. This tetchy old egotist has a voice like the last, exhausted spurt of steam from a railway engine and, happily for him and for us, nothing whatsoever to do with the plot. There can be nothing quite so good in the play as the open- ing scene, before the wheels begin to turn, which presents an exquisite portrait of a grossly material-
istic society. There is no-air in the Chiltern draw-
ing-room, no glimpse of the night sky through the long windows, only palm fronds in a steamy con- servatory. The talk runs endlessly on food—the capitals of Europe are judged by it, the ladies feel' positively faint for want of it, the men get roman- tic after it. Hunger is always a safe subject for Wilde's well-fed men and women. Greed for money or power might be more dangerous, but no one could possibly suspect sincerity beneath their passion for food.
There are traces of the toil of valets and par- lourmaids in every detail of Anthony Holland's sets and costumes; and James Roose-Evans's direction leaves no doubt that the same secret labour has gone into perfecting the characters'
elaborate mask of languor and indifference. It is no fault of the production that when the mask slips the results are painful to watch.
'He that will have a Maypole, shall have a Maypole,' as Congreve observed, and the place to
go, if you are he, is either the Palladium or the Shaftesbury. Both are currently offering the Robin Hood story, with Maypole dancing nightly,
sing-songs, tumblers, pinging arrows, Arthur Askey or Barbara Windsor, in fact anything goes to hold up the plot. The pantomime is only a shade more trad than Twang!—Note the sadistic undertones,' advises the Fat Boy being caned in the school scene. Both shows are more rowdy
than bawdy, and both rely more or less success- fully on lavish gift wrappings to conceal any old humps in the plot.
HILARY SPURLING
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