THEATRE
Samuel smiles
HILARY SPURLING
Honeymoon (Hampstead Theatre Club) What baffles me about our various well-mean- ing avant-gardes is their prodigious appetite
for punishment. Why, for instance, should the Hampstead Theatre Club cheapen its normally admirable programme with periodic bouts of mindless claptrap? Or what are we to make of, say, Frank Doherty's comments on his master (not, as one might suppose, some appalling amalgam of Gruntfuttock and Sid Rumpold, bu( Samuel Beckett) in a programme note which recommends 'the terrible beauty of this unsmil- ing sixty-one year old private man'? Good for a laugh perhaps—one of the three in Watt which strictly speaking are not laughs: the bitter, the hollow and the mirthless.
Icor Mr Doherty's note concerns A Remnant which he has produced; and anyone nippy enough to catch the programme at the Arts last week was in for a pleasant surprise. Jack Emery has to be sure the floury hair, red eyes and rotten gums which have become regulation dress for Beckett. But he has also, among other things, that flavour of dandified clubland, of gaslight and horse-drawn cabs, meerschaum pipes and washleather fobs, which still clings to Hamm Of Henry though his hat turn green and his bowels rot. Particularly fine as brisk and affable Watt —running smartly through the calendar from crocus time to new-mown hay, from wasps lit the jam to the first autumn fires, 'and of course the snow and to be sure the sleet and bless your heart the slush'—Mr Emery is equally good as the dilapidated wanderer among rainwashed Irish hills who ponders dreamily the miracles of Nature: 'A ton of worms in an acre, there is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I be- lieve it' What, in short, made the evening pleasure was the fact that Mr Emery has found so very many characters—pedant, raconteur and racy toff, genial Watt, sweetly pensive moribund Malone—skulking beneath what Mr Doherty will call, in his woolly way, 'Beckett's Man . . . on his . . . Sufferer's Progress . . . the crucified victim of time.' The crucified victim cackles waspishly from his deathbed, raises his head for a reproving glance at the audience and falls back mumbling at the ceiling the hilarious tale of Jackson and the parrot: 'My relation- ship with Jackson was of short duration. I could have put up with him as a friend, but un- fortunately he found me disgusting, as did John- son, Wilson, Nicolson and Watson. . .
Altogether an enchanting evening—though not without its longueurs, notably some un- called-for funny business with a crackly ampli-
fier and, especially in the first piece, a tendency to loud hysterics which overlay the fastidious and sombre rhythms of the text. Here, as Malone himself says, throes are the trouble. Mr Emery must be on his guard against throes. And the director of the Hampstead Theatre
Club should perhaps be on his guard against his own charitable impulses. Malcolm Quan- trill's Honeymoon is another example of Mr Roose-Evans's reluctance to disappoint a hope- ful author. He is kind only to be cruel and does no service to Mr Quantrill, whose technical in- competence, drab dialogue and underfurnished imagination are here fearfully exposed.
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