Theatre
THE QUEEN AND THE REBELS. By Ugo Betti. (Haymarket.)--THE CLASSICAL THEATRE OF CHINA. (Palace.) LET me get the praise over with. This is one of the most exciting plays to have been performed in London (or anywhere else for that matter) in recent years. Betti specialised in this kind of political melodrama, and his humanity and psychological insight combine with his rigor- ous sense of justice to make his recapitulation of the known themes of ends and means memorable. The plot of The Queen and the Rebels is fundamentally simple. A queen who has escaped the fate of her family at the hands of revolutionaries is being sought by them and in particular by a commissar whose devotion to his cause is exempt from the petty tyrannies of his subordinates. The queen is terrified. She is afraid of being tortured and, in fact, com- mits suicide after an attempt by a prostitute to help her escape has failed. Whereupon the prostitute is taken for the queen by the com- missar, and accepts the role with a nobility the real queen had long lost in the welter of some Ekaterinburg. The commissar tries to make her tell the names of her friends, threatens to have the queen's small son (who has been brought up as a peasant in a mountain village) taken out and shot, and eventually does execute the woman he believes to be the queen, holding his hands over the small boy's ears so that he shall not hear the volley.
This I take to be a play about the quality of royalty, which is a human attribute or, rather, a certain manner of possessing human attri- butes. Betti asserts the existence of this. quality. If the queen cannot overcome her fear of tor- ture, the prostitute can and the dignity of humanity is saved by that possibility. If the prostitute is to be queen, the queen's son is to be a peasant, and this reversal shows how the concept of human nobility is dissociated from heredity and other social factors. It is the opportunity that makes the aristocrat. Human- ists must believe that, and the gradual trans- formation of the prostitute as she reaches the height of her situation is a most moving testi- mony to the power of the unitary being we call man. For the motivation is plain. It is the situation that transforms her, and pique at a lover's desertion plays no part in the meta- morphosis. Irene Worth brings to this part immense power and conviction. It gives her the chance of a great performance and she takes it superbly. Here, too, apparently, it is opportunity that counts.
The commissar also is presented in terms of nobility—as a man not quite Satanic but whose grandeur is shot through with the nihilism that is common to many of Betti's characters and whose driving power is a devouring desire for justice here and now on earth among men. How well he understood it. and which of us has not at one time or another experienced that black rage and willed to make a tabula rasa of the civilisation we live in? The strange com- fort that comes from the breakdown of a society, the hatred of mere patching, the relief
of stripping the foundations bare and the dig- nity that old institutions have only at the moment of their death—these feelings Betti comprehended, and to them he has given ex- pression in the fine rhetoric of the commissar's long speech. Leo McKern begins quietly in this part, but develops it until his every word is a blow. His way of speaking his lines gives meaning to the term 'authority,' which is rarely met with on our stage. This is how the part should be acted, and in Mr. McKern I foresee many creations of this kind.
Indeed, this whole production does credit to everyone concernedalso incidentally to the Third Programme of the BBC, which, I gather, commissioned Henry Reed's translation of the play, thereby making its playing in this country possible. For anyone who does not scorn rhetoric and is not too fine to be interested in humanity this will be an experience not easily forgotten. It is a moral play in the true sense of the word, and there must be something exemplary in Argia's defiance of death. 'Le dernier acre est sanglant, quelque belle que soft la comodie en tout le reste. On jette de la terre sur la tete, et en voila pour jamais.' This defeat, Ugo Betti tells us, we avert by no inward belief but in ourselves, and by no outward show but by a style in living. When the drama is played out, there is still left a man alone upon a stage.
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Pleasure of a different kind is given by the Chinese Classical Theatre. Here we are to appreciate the astonishing virtuosity of mime, acrobatics and dancing. An actor mimes the Monkey King and he is a monkey, walks like one, scratches like one. A boatman is deemed to be quanting his skiff up-river, and the river seems to be there. Among so many items I can only single out one or two, but the battle of the monkeys and the gods was an astonishing piece of spectacular staging and the fight be- tween two men supposed to be in the dark (on a brightly lighted stage) was the funniest thing since the early Chaplin. Let us hope we see the Chinese Classical Theatre again, and that, one day, they will give us a complete play.
ANTHONY HARTLEY
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