Theatre
Not so
willkommen; Kenneth Hurren litaa About halfway through the third, leaden act of the Bochum Schauspielhaus production of Little Man — What Now?, which opened the new World Theatre Season at the Aldwych this week, a man sitting at a café table observing the Berlin scene of the early 'thirties tells us that he is an English writer. A moment later someone addresses him as " Christ opher "; and a moment after that he is introduced to someone else as " Mr Isherwood."
In common, I daresay, with other insomniacs in the audience, I felt that this little triple-play not only demonstrated why the evening (by that time dragging into its fourth hour) was threatening, in a famous phrase, to impinge upon eternity, but gave away the cynical motive for embarking on the show at all, and at the same time illuminated the measure of its ineptness by the cruelty of an inescapable comparison. To spell this out a little more clearly, every point is made twice too often (even when a shop assistant carries a bolt of cloth across the stage, he does it three times, while nothing else is happening); the suspicion is confirmed that the resemblance of the piece in period and form to Cabaret is no mere coincidence; and, of course, the fact that the resemblance more or less ended right there, and certainly did not extend to the quality and unity of the material, had to be painfully faced.
I find it disagreeable to write in this way of a visiting production. The World Theatre Seasons have been annual events to welcome. warmly and there had been higher hopes of this one — reportedly the last of the series — than of any of its predecessors. Further, the West German company seems excellent. In all truth, though, this is a tedious farrago they have brought with them. There is • no easily discernible reason why Hans Fallada's novel, which has already been made the basis of popular moving. pictures in Germany and Hollywood, should not lend itself as readily as the story of Sally Bowles to a musical form, contrasting the heady, tawdry decadence ' of the Berlin cabarets with the gruelling lives of 'little people ' in a time of economic depression and political turmoil. In the event, due in part to the ponderous dramatisation and in further part to the inadequacy of the interpolated musical bits, the affair is a disaster.
The basic story itself is simple and inoffensive to the point of triteness — a tale of a downtrodden young couple, poor but honest and born losers, who end up with only their love to keep them warm — and it is not made irresistibly touching by the approach to their encounters with the world of capitalism and corruption that the late Herr Brecht might easily have thought a touch lopsided. Ever. so, the conflict between the Communist and Nazi ideologies among the herrenv one, and the portents of the ultimate triumph of the latter, are so blurred as to be almost unnoticeable; and the production numbers presumably intended to communicate the flavour of the ' decadence ' permeating the upper reaches of society — a husky impersonation of Marlene Dietrich in her Blue Angel period, or a line of bleak-looking chorus girls in top hats, black stockings and garters — are roughly as disturbing as pier pavilion pierrots.
My acquaintance with the German tongue is, I'm afraid, sketchy, but I cannot feel that anything very significant was lost in the translation relayed to my ears via the baton transistors thoughtfully available to indifferent linguists. There was, indeed, one piece in English which struck me as being as inappropriate and irrelevant as anything in the show. This was a rendition of the song, 'A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody.' I found its inclusion inscrutable, though I did wake up in the night wondering whether just conceivably, the composer had anything to do with it. His name is Berlin; Irving Berlin.
The next presentation in the World Theatre Season is the Victor Garcia production of Lorca's Yerma for the Nuria Espert company which, last year, was everybody's favourite except mine. Meanwhile, there is an English treatment of Lorca at the Greenwich Theatre where Tom Stoppard's version of The House of Bernarda Alba is available in a curiously passionless production by Robin Phillips. Written in 1936, two years after Yerma, it is also concerned with the depressing plight of rural women of Spain borne down by the weight of pious traditions that might have been especially designed to frustrate their libidos. For some reason not altogether clear to me, Bernarda Alba's daughters are having to endure eight years of chastity as a mark of mourning for their lately deceased father. The inevitable rebellion burns on a long, slow fuse, and everything is heavy with such unsubtle symbolism as the sound of a randy stallion kicking at the door of its barn. I hope Lorca's work did something to ease the predicament of the ladies of Spain. I fear it does little for me.
My unusually gloomy week also included Athol Fugard's Hello and Goodbye, an early work by this South African author, which two of the Royal Shakespeare Company's players, Janet Suzman and Ben Kingsley, are doing with palpable and fierce sincerity at the King's Head, Islington, and which has to do with impoverished Afrikaaners on the wrong side of the tracks in Port Elizabeth. Kingsley and Miss Suzman play brother and sister (he some species of religious nut, she a not perceptibly successful prostitute) picking over the accumulated debris of their hard life and times; and the play, though of no great consequence in itself has haunting moments of pain and compassion that presaged — we can observe with hindsight — the sustained lyricism and more adroit craftsmanship of Boesman and Lena.
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