Theatre
Missing
Peter Jenkins
The Revolt (New End) Dangerous Corner (Ambassadors) Trelawny of the Wells (Old Vic) The Rivals (Greenwich) Cinderella (Lyric, Hammersmith) Not everybody's idea of Christmas theatregoing I fear, and not quite mine either. Children would be bored rigid by The Revolt, an obscure piece by a minor French symbolist, while Cinderella at the Lyric, Hammersmith is short on adult entertainment value. Priestley stones me cold, although he remains remarkably popular, while Pinero has been ill-served by time and the Old Vic, The Rivals at Greenwich is not up to the standard of their She Stoops to Conquer last year but then nor is the play.
The Revolt ought to be interesting but it isn't. It is one of those pieces — scarcely a play — vvhich would he more enjoyable heard discussed on Radio Three than sat through in a theatre, although it is short enough. Villiers de L'Isle-Adam was a litterateur of noble birth who operated on the fringe of the circle of Baudelaire and Mallarme. The Revolt is about a woman, Elizabeth, who feels that her life with herhusband, Felix, is a living death. She attempts to leave him but she has been so utterly destroyed by the four years of her marriage that she soon returns, submitting to 'the eternal ennui that women like us are doomed to suffer'.
De L'Isle-Adam was aggrieved by the acclaim with which Ibsen's Ghosts was received nine years after the failure of The Revolt but he had no real cause for complaint. His is more poem than play and although it has some feminist undertones the argument is not essentially between man and woman, or husband and wife, but rather between idealism and materialism, poetry and commerce. Elizabeth's womanhood is used by the author as a vehicle for his own artistic sensibility while Felix is a cardboard philistine; Baudelaire rings in her ears, cash registers in his. Felix is totally unable to comprehend her state of despair and when she returns from her humiliating attempt at escape he shows not the slightest magnanimity; that she should have been capable of such folly and perversity only went to show that 'As long as poetry exists in this world decent people will not be safe.'
Simone Benmussa, the French director Who specialises in a peculiarly static and arty form of theatre, says it is 'a play about language, a play in which two forms of language are brought into violent opposition and two forms of society with them,' But it isn't; the argument is too one-sided for there to be much of conflict and Felix is even less of a character than Elizabeth; 'violent' is a singularly inappropriate de scription of their literary exchanges. Benmussa makes no attempt to give theatrical life to the piece, rather she insists with heavy staging, dim lighting, and her highly stylised, ultra-refined direction upon draining what living force might remain in this curious relic. Only the beautiful speaking of Susan Hampshire redeems this conspiracy of dead hands.
I am sorry that I can see so little merit in the dramatic works of J. B. Priestley. Never mind, he can cry all the way to the bank and I hope that Peter Bridges, who has revived this hoary money-spinner, will be able to shed a tear or two on the way to his. Dangerous Corner is an indestructible empty vessel which Priestley turned in 1932 to demonstrate his technical skill; it has been beloved of amateurs ever since. We are asked to be interested in the death of someone called Martin which occurs before we take our seats. There is talk also of someone called Slater, and someone else called Whitehouse, and of 'dear old Watson'. Who are these people? Where are these people?
Everything which might be of interest takes place off stage or ages ago. What we see is people in evening dress standing around after dinner playing a truth game which sends skeletons and clichés spilling all over the carpet of a mock-Tudor drawing room. Martin, it turns out, was a bit of a cad, what you might call a rotter, and what is more showed women 'obscene drawings by some mad Belgian artist'. What did Whitehouse say about that? Each of the spouses is secretly in love with another, forming an unrequited daisy chain; time too comes its full circle and the play ends with a reprise of the beginning which creates the only frisson of the evening lest it should be done all through again. Who killed Martin? Who was Martin? A good cast, efficiently directed by Robert Gillespie, plays it straight and theatre-goers who like this sort of thing will receive full value for their money.
If Priestley is to be revived it is right that he should be revived in the commercial theatre and not, as has been done, at the public expense. Trelawny of the Wells by Arthur Wing Pinero is a genuine Victorian period piece which, if it is to be done at all, needs the full National Theatre treatment, The resources of the Old Vic, both artistic and financial, were not up to the job and a heavy provincial air descended upon the production. It was difficult on this showing, as well as on others recently, to dissent from the judgment of the Arts Council, There simply isn't room for a provincial repertory company in London.
Last year's She Stoops . . was a great triumph at Greenwich and some of the same people are involved in Patrick Mason's production of The Rivals which has been brought over from the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. The play makes an ideal school text because, as a comedy of manners should, it contains a vast amount of social documentary information. You can quickly learn from it more than you need to know about 18th-century life in Bath, about town and country, duelling, circulating libraries and so on. There is no great bite to the satire which falls chiefly upon romantic sensibility but the women come out of it better than the men and the servants better than their masters and mistresses. Trouble is that The Rivals Mrs Malaprop apart — just isn't funny enough these days. Bob Acres, for example, is such a tedious type that not even Enn Reitel (who was brilliant in the Jack Gold Merchant of Venice on television) could make much of him. By a singular feat of acting the formidable Nickolas Grace managed to turn Falkland, one of the great bores of English literature, into a show-stealing performance.
The Lyric, Hammersmith's Cinderella is to be highly recommended for children, It tells the story nicely, if a little patronisingly, is beautifully dressed and ingeniously staged, and is full of charm and fun. Especially effective are the pumpkin transformation and the dance of the cockroaches. The footlights are breached not by the cast but by a chaotic four-piece Italian Band of musician-actors (none of them real Italians) who comment on the play and engage with the audience. Adult traditionalists, of which I am one, will miss the spicier ingredients of real pantomime — stand-upcomics, chorus girls and music hall turns. My own children were enchanted enough, but then they like the real thing too; I found it too coy to be comic for the most part; the only adult entertainment available was from Alison Steadman doing Widow Peahen with apologies to Zsa-Zsa Gabor and Cruella De Ville and, most saving of all graces, the camp genius of the one-and-only Miss Eleanor Bron.
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