ARTS Home thoughts from abroad
ROBERT CUSHMAN
As I understand it the main function of the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company is to provide its predominantly undergraduate membership with a few weeks in the us each winter. To this end a Shake- spearian production is mounted, under a professional director, and run in on each of its home grounds before being unleashed on the American college circuit. This year's play is Twelfth Night ; it was on view at the Cambridge Arts Theatre last week, and will be fetching up at the Oxford Playhouse in November.
Jonathan Miller's production, as might have been expected, carries a full complement of programme notes, not all of them calcu- lated to raise the spirits of the reader. An emphasis on the dark side of this comedy has become so pronounced in recent years that it no longer seems merely a side. It has grown to envelop the entire play, possibly because it is easier to capture a single mood than to do justice to a text with as many aspects as the dodecahedron, which in this production mysteriously adorns Olivia's garden. ('I hope' says Mr Miller 'that we have not made any of these emblems too explicit': his secret in this instance is safe with me.) Maybe it is mystically related to the device, whose planes I failed to count, which hangs from the necks of both Viola and Sebastian, here more convincingly twinned than ever before in my experience.
In large measure this is to be credited to Hugh Durrant. This young designer's immense promise is on the whole more evident here in his rich, sombre sets than in his costumes, but in accoutring the twins as celestial pierrots he has brilliantly served his director's conception. They move among the Illyrians as creatures, not merely from another country but from another world.
This means that as a commentator and catalyst Hilary Henion's Viola carries un- usual conviction. But she is also required to be an actress in the comedy, in if not quite of it, and the precise gradations of feeling this entails have been rather muddied. This Viola comes at times dangerously close to partaking of her master's sentimentality. Here, as elsewhere, the director makes demands which it is beyond his cast's tech- nical means to fulfil.
They act, nonetheless, with distinction, particularly Mike Wood whose Orsino, lolling on a day-bed to ingest the food of love, has all the absurd charm of the incur- ably self-centred, and must earn our thanks for the remarkable sweetness of the airs with which his taste, diseased or not, has furnished this Illyria.
A miniature choir has been retained to sing them since it is an apparent point of interpretation (or perhaps merely a conces- sion to the frailties of the actor) that Feste shall be permitted no more than a single halting chorus of '0 mistress mine'. Shut out from Orsino's court he is denied the un- comfortable avowal that he takes pleasure in singing ; uncomfortable since it is plainly Mr Miller's intention that he shall take pleasure in nothing much beyond the baiting of Malvolio. And this is altogether a rigged contest since Hugh Thomas (the sadistic prefect of If . ..) is as sympathetic a steward as I have seen, unimpeachably good at his job, unruffled by the revellers (he can even turn his back and warm his hands at the fire while admonishing them in the primmest of good Welsh terms—their rage is the greater) and with his final humiliation in prison, which Shakespeare carefully distanced, brought distressingly before our eyes. It is withal a very funny, detailed performance and (what puts this production decisively ahead of John Barton's faintly similar con- ception at Stratford) it does not stand alone.
The knights are very well played. Toby (Jonathan James-Moore) is not in fact par- ticularly unusual, the standard bloated English gentleman, executed with brio and with a stinging contempt always in reserve. What is original • is his relationship with Andrew. Perhaps the two were at school together (their ages, student make-up being what it is, are difficult to ascertain) ; certainly there is a resemblance, and Mark Wing Davey's Aguecheek completely banishes the fey young hopeful to whom we have become accustomed. I hope he returns for I was fond of him, but in the meantime this blunt-witted young boor fits the lines uncannily well.
There are still loose ends, ideas floating in the director's head which have not always come to rest on the stage. By the end he has created so many outsiders (Antonio too is given the full lonelyhearts treatment) that one wonders what the lucky couples are going to use for company within their new Elysium. The pace, as often with university players, is liable to sag. But if the quality is wavering it is nonetheless there. It left me impatient to see Jonathan Miller at work on Shakespeare with professionals. And since King Lear with Michael Hordern and The Merchant of Venice with the Oliviers are to follow in quick succession, impatience should be amply rewarded.
While we engagingly flounder others attain a forbidding perfection. Jerzy Grotowski's Laboratory Theatre from Poland and the Compagnie Madeleine Renaud/Jean-Louis Barrault have in their divergent ways taken sheer technique as far as it is ever likely to go. If the Poles seemed to me the purer troupe of the two this may well be because French is a language I have dim pretensions to understanding while in the Stepney crypt to which the ICA conducted us by coach, practically under a vow of secrecy (a pro- cedure I commend to any company wishing to induce togetherness in its audience) sense perforce was nothing and sensation all. Or to be more precise violence was all.
Calderon's The Constant Prince was stripped down to what the company took to be its essentials, and these amounted to the infliction and endurance of pain. Why the prince is being tortured we are never told (not, anyway, in the synopsis and so, I pre- sume, not in the perfomance). The existential fact of suffering overwhelmed everything else, so that, except when they took the form of grotesque knockabout, one became im- pervious to variations in the texture. It was as if Lear's 'Howl' should continue inde- finitely, a sojourn on the outer reaches of acting as at present conceived, and imma- culately executed. But I was glad to get away.
Barrault's Rabelais (National Theatre) is 3auch more like home, though its revered author is probably turning in his grave at roughly the same rate as Calderon. Barrault has not assimilated Grotowski yet, but give him time ; Most other conceivable influences are there (including large helpings of his own) and winningly served up. The master himself presides over the revels like an indulgent schoolteacher, game for any rag the kids can dream up. But the real glory resides at the Royal Court where Madeleine Renaud transfigures Marguerite Duras's L'Amame anglaise with a performance of a magni- ficence to which the word 'great' does scant justice.
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