Theatre
Christian in New York City By BAMBER GASCOIGNE Fairy Tales of New York. (Comedy.) — Master- piece. (Royalty.) — We're Just Not Prac- tical. (Stratford, East.) —The Importance of Being Oscar. (Royal Court.) SHIRLEY MACLAINE, the highest bouncing oddball of them all, described herself when she was over here a few months ago as a kook. J. P. Donleavy is another brilliant kook from America and in Fairy Tales of New York he has dished up a weirdly exciting evening meal. It consists of four almost entirely discon- nected scenes, roughly corresponding to a menu of bird's-nest soup ('Helen'), prime beaf steak very, very rare (`The Interview'), roly-poly pud- ding (`The Knockout') and, to complete the even- ing, the lightest of meringues (Teach Shoes'). Nobody would choose these four dishes to make a well-rounded meal and nobody could expect Donleavy's four scenes to add up to a play. Yet, miraculously, they do—even though there is no narrative and the hero is the only character to appear in more than one of the scenes.
The miracle is partly due to the consistent tact of Mr. Donleavy's kookery. His script is full of the gentlest surprises, he never takes the obvious satirical line that leads to brash extravagance. Most satirists would jump at the idea of a per- sonnel officer whose jargon cpnceals a total lack of interest in persons. Donleavy's man uses the jargon ('we've gotta try and reconstruct this rela- tionship' and 'can't we galvanise this into a new situation?'), but he has a very warm heart; the humour and irony come from his attempts to use the jargon to express it. Similarly, in this play it is the undertaker who is career-conscious CI went through Mortician School when I came out of the army') and the industrial executive who is acutely aware of death. In some moods Mr. Donleavy can out-Ionesco Eugene; in others he out-Simpsons N. F. The girl, bewildered by a smart restaurant, restrains our impatient hero with: 'We come from the same background. Our backgrounds are medium and middling. We can't be sure that we're right.' A gymnast, accused of homosexuality, retorts angrily: 'I got six kids. I don't have time to be a homosexual.'
Even so, these fairy tales might have seemed jnst a well-knit revue, but for the brilliant direct- ing and acting in this production. Philip Wise- man's direction matches the cool precision of Donleavy's writing. There is never an inch of superfluous furniture or movement. Nothing is overstressed, and his black-outs come brutally, briskly, brilliantly in the slight pause when one is waiting for the traditional black-out line. As in the writing, surprise works both ways. The un- expected comes, the expected doesn't. The effect is exhilarating, and Wiseman's cast deserves all his skill. Barry Foster plays with the minimum of effort and the maximum of effect the disillusioned young hero whose vision of the world (as if through yellow polaroid lenses— jaundiced but not sick, dark yet very clear) colours the whole play.
All the other male parts are taken by Robert Ayres and Harry Towb, each of whom ends the evening with a royal straight flush of cameo per- formances to his credit. They don't disguise themselves at all for their different parts— another routine theatrical pleasure dispensed with—but each plays the same type of character throughout. Robert Ayres, heavy, responsible, serious, is always the boss; Harry Towb, volatile and warm-hearted, the bossed. So their per- formances provide yet another sense of form and unity in this strange play.
One further merit of this pilgrim's progress through New York City (it is presumably no accident that the hero is, like Bunyan's,. called Christian) is that there can be more of it. These four incidents are an arbitrary number which happen to fill an evening in the theatre. With luck this same company will be able to bring us, in two years' time, More Fairy Tales of New York. Meanwhile the four in this first edition are the coolest since Thurber and shouldn't be missed.
The subject of Masterpiece cries out for Brechtian treatment. What is esthetic value? Can it be separated from the other two values of a work of art, historical and financial? Can we have a purely msthetic response to a painting, or are we inevitably cultural animals, conditioned by our knowledge of art and history? Van Meegeren's forgeries of Vermeer bring up these fascinating questions and many others, but the authors of Masterpiece concentrate instead on Van Meegeren's personal problems and motives. Only in the last ten minutes do they pose the wider questions, and then they wriggle away with the semi-mystical conclusion that Van Meegeren's Christ at Emmaus was a masterpiece, but that he 'became Vermeer' while painting it. They thus reduce an extraordinary subject to an ordinary play: A leaf from Brecht's notebooks would also have spared us much ranting by minor characters under major stresses.
Coming at this particular season, We're Just Not Practical can perhaps be explained as Joan Littlewood's annual sale. She seems to have put into this boiler-room and boarding-house farce all the loose ends, stray cuttings and discon- tinued lines from her recent productions on a strict Everything Must Go basis. Very little of it does go, though there are excellent comic performances by Amelia Bayntum, Stephen Cato and Roy Kinnear in the best Littlewood style—a style poised delicately somewhere be- tween the Berliner Ensemble and charades at a children's tea party. Perhaps this parody of itself will clear the air at Theatre Workshop. Several of the local ideas have recently become mere gimmicks, particularly in the hands of the Little- wood disciples. One shouldn't, for example, need to point out that a dull conversation is not redeemed by having the actors jive round the place as they chat.
Michael Mac Liammoir is back in London for a short time with the green carnation still in his button-hole and Oscar Wilde in his bones.
The Importance of Being Oscar is not just a recital, nor a mere impersonation; it is a com- pact, critical biography. Its brilliance, even apart from Mr. Mac Liammoir's virtuoso acting, is that the prose in which he tells the story and links his extracts is as witty and polished as Wilde's.
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