THEATRE
Wiener schnitzer
KENNETH HURREN
Before last week all I knew about Robert Sherwood's play, Reunion in Vienna, was a story Alexander Woo11cott used to tell about a scene in which the exiled Hapsburg archduke, back in Vienna after ten years, speculates idly on whether Frau Lucher still wears the red flannel drawers with which the patrons of her hotel were once so familiar, and, at an opportune moment, lifts her skirt to see. Alfred Lunt always played the archduke and the nearest he ever came to ' drying,' according to Woollcott, was on the night when the actress, Helen Westley forgot to put on her drawers. The actor gazed upwards with dropping jaw and spluttered over his next line, which was : "Well, thank God there's one thing in Vienna that hasn't changed! "
I commend this anecdote to the sponsors of the forty-years-on revival of the play at Chichester. What can happen once by accident can happen regularly by design: Reunion in Vienna could use any extraneous diversion that might be cooked up, and with a little co-operation from Beatrix Lehmann who plays Frau Lucher It's hard to think what else might be done for this dispiriting antique, a glib romantic comedy 'for which I should have thought a score by Ivor Novello a sine qua non even in 1931, as a crutch for its limping text and to render its arrogant hero occasionally sufferable as a romantic figure : a mellifluous tenor chirruping of glamorous nights and careless raptures would at least provide relief from the fellow's dreadful manners. He has come back to Vienna, this Hapsburg, intent on resuming briefly his liaison with a former mistress, though she is now wedded to one of the most esteemed psychiatrists in a city which, even then, was stiff with them. She, inscrutably, is in two minds about it, and the great romantic climax is when they are left alone in her tolerant husband's house, and the lights dim and we wonder. Perhapsburg and perhaps not.
Nigel Patrick and Margaret Leighton, a personable enough pair, can scarcely persuade us that this charming man and this bemused lady were ever in the Dante and Beatrice league or that a resumption of the affair, so rudely interrupted by the revolution, would show that Vienna still had its heart in the right place. They do so persuade the personnel of the play, but it is a specialized crowd : mostly dispossessed aristocrats and Franz Josef courtiers, dreaming old dreams of the good life they had when Vienna was Vienna, mein liebling, looking back and turning into pillars of sugar to the strains of a waltz.
In London, our two subsidized giants, the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company renewed their West End rivalry, both mounting new productions. Keeping you waiting for the good news, I'll get the National's tawdry piece out of the way first. Tyger, then, at the New, is offered as 'a celebration' of William Blake, and is the footless invention of one Adrian Mitchell, who has had the notion that his hero's story is somehow apposite to the plight of today's anti-Establishment rebels; rock music by Mike Westbrook hammers home the supposed contemporary relevance.
Despite Blake's arguably disingenuous sexual philosophy and his tussle or two with authority, there seems to me something quietly lunatic in the position of this relatively pious man, with his radiant religious visions, as a cult hero of the protest groups; and I'm afraid that Mitchell, though he is, of course, entitled to his point of view, does little to support it in his choice of specific links between Blake's world and our own. There is one inane moment when anti-Blake sentiments are skittishly identified with anti-black attitudes in Wolverhampton, and his material generally is too infantile even to aspire to being thought pretentious. Apart from Gerald James, who maintains a desperate dignity though assigned to portray the central figure as an ageing hippie, his dialogue an unlikely compound of Blake quotations and present-day cliches (" Tell me what turns you on,' Kate "), the cast includes about three dozen members of the National Theatre company who, assuming they are able to *read, seem remarkably acquiescent.
The fact that so few of us are able to read Russian perhaps accounts for our long neglect of Gorki's Enemies, available for the first time in an RSC production at the Aldwych. Alternatively one can suspect, and I do, a major work of adaptation, as creative as it is sensitive, by the authors of this English version, Kitty Hunter Blake and Jeremy Brooks. Certainly The Lower Depths — the only Gorki play hitherto produced here, conceivably a masterpiece but a glum, one-note business, never especially invigorating — had illprepared me for this engrossing dispatch from the provincial Russia of 1906, coping, in some bewilderment, with the rising tide of socialism.
Enemies is like Galsworthy re-written by Chekhov (Strife imposed upon The Cherry Orchard), the former's taut drawing of battle-lines between bosses and proletariat given an extra dimension by the latter's love of detailed characterization and delicate orchestration of the mood of a crumbling society. Given the place and the time, any synopsis of the actual events of the play, concerned as they are with trouble at mill (or at least with a sticky labour relations problem in the BardinSkrobotov factory off-stage, beyond the house and garden where we meet representatives of both sides), would undoubtedly lead you to think dismally of all the Soviet propagandist drama you've ever come across, making its dutiful obeisances to the glorious epoch of the workers. In fact, though Gorki's intellectual sympathies are with the aspirations of the cloth-cap chaps, he devotes most of his attention to the predicament of the Bardin family, decent country gentlefolk with no stomach for tyrannizing their employees, well-meaning liberal humanists, doomed to be swept aside as the militant socialists and harder-line capitalists come to death-grips.
One Bardin brother is shrewd enough to have sensed which way the wind is blowing but is too feeble in spirit to do more than offer a defeated commentary as he disintegrates alcoholically on the sidelines like a fly dissolving in acid; and John Wood, who joins the company to play this pivotal character, gives a performance so masterly that it might easily have disastrously unbalanced the ensemble. That it doesn't is due to David Jones's direction, loving and lucid, discreet and detailed, to which the rest of the Royal Shakespeare players respond so perceptively and grippingly that I am on forgivingly good terms again even with those who are presently also prostituting their gifts in the service of Mr Brook's Shakespearian travesty.
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