Theatre
Easy credit
Mark Amory
Money (The Pit) Marry Me a Little (King's Head) Don Quixote (Olivier) Aunt Mary (Warehouse)
Money is immensely agreeable stuff. There is however not much to be said about it, there are no depths to be plumbed. The moral vision presented is hardly more sophisticated than the song 'Nobody wants you when you're down and out' though an unsentimental sharpness is brought to bear on the good and there is a genial toleration of the bad. Bulwer-Lytton's melodrama is set in 1840, a period pleasantly unfamiliar to me, later than Jane Austen but earlier than the Victorian novelists I know best. A will is read, there is young love which will presumably triumph in the end and a host of relations and villains offering good parts to good actors. Moral worth is measured by the degree of financial greed. Clara, the heroine (Juliet Stevenson), refuses to marry her true love because they are both poor and she has seen how destructive poverty can be. I thought this practical streak might be her undoing but it turns out to be accep- table. The hero (Paul Shelley), though a bit- ter, not to say priggish, scholar who ought to know better, spends the great fortune he suddenly inherits on a grand life and social climbing into circles he despises. This seems to go unremarked. Lady Franklin (Miriam Karlin) says frankly that she is rich and so is liberated to pursue a widower (George Raistick), the only other character who does not care about money. He thinks himself wretched and unlucky while we can see that he is blessed and happy. The characters tell us things they cannot tell one another so we are always ahead. Among the wicked is Sir John Vesey (John Burgess), whose plotting provides the excellent plot. He says at the end, 'My fault was never avarice', which, like Othello saying he is 'a man not easily moved to jealousy', is either a thumping lie or self deception on a monstrous scale. Sir Frederick Blount (Miles Anderson), though eager to marry what cash he can and a worthless if decorative fop, is allowed to be pleasant and Dudley Smooth (Bernard Lloyd), who lives by gambling (and only drinks
lemonade when playing piquet — a sinister sign), is positively charming. I have named so many actors because all are good. The first note I made was 'looks like the coffee room of a club' so it was satisfactory when, having done unconvincing service as a drawing-room, the set was supposed to be exactly that. Scattered throughout the even- ing are observations of worldly wisdom such as, 'When you borrow from a friend you don't pay interest but he sells you a horse.' Not so ambitiously universal as Wilde's epigrams, they lack also their air of polished smugness.
The rest is disappointment. Marry Me a Little consists of unfamiliar, unconnected songs by Stephen Sondheim. They are given to constant characters, a man and a woman living alone in neighbouring apartments in Brooklyn. Sondheim has written often of loneliness and the fear of commitment and New York so the idea is rather like that of collecting a whole series of John Updike stories about marriage, the family and div- orce written over years. Updike's resulting volume, Your Lover Just Called (brilliant), had something like a story if it was still by no means a novel. But the Sondheim show remains just one song after another, no character let alone a story emerges. Fur- thermore, the songs are rejects from various shows and at their best remind you of the ones that stayed in, while casting doubt on nobody's judgment. I wanted to hear every word and I did (the singing is fine) but I cannot remember a striking line. It hurts my fingers to type it but 'Tell Me on a Sunday', the song part of Song and Dance, is more touching as well as more hummable and as a committed Sondheim fan I was sorry/grateful for this chance to go through his unremarkable waste paper basket.
Don Quixote must be a candidate for the most frequently unfinished book of all time. Bill Bryden's team have accustomed us to bare stages at the Cottesloe and onto the much wider open spaces of the Olivier rides Don Quixote on an ornately elegant tricycle, equipped with a horse's head and lance; after a few moments with the melan- choly dignity and wrought iron voice that come naturally to Paul Scofield, Sancho Panza (Tony Haygarth) comes beetling in on a squat practical model. It is a striking opening but it turns out to contain the whole evening. The famous scenes are run through but they are incidents without development, a fact which is underlined by their order having been changed at the last moment. Some lend themselves to drama- tisation, most do not. Nothing is added to the outlines with which we are familiar.
More talent that I have enjoyed in the past is gathered together to no purpose at the newly comfortable Warehouse. Aunt Mary by Pam Gems has burly Alfred Marks in a blue and white check frock that mat- ches the ribbon that ties up his pigtails. He lives with two other transvestites apparently in a hoarding which also contains a hair- dresser. A blind poet and a nice old lady who likes to change her name call frequent- ly. There are petrol pumps where they have tea and a seat straddles a pond. All veil odd. We get a Birthday Party, a Death, 0 Rebirth and a Marriage as well as constant references to Tennessee Williams, se perhaps it is all about Camino Real comes] to Birmingham or the beauty in the lives or social outcasts or the sexually ambiguous role of the modern writer; or perhaps not.
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