Theatre
Putting Up a Black
By ALAN BRIEN Hot Summer Night. (New.)— Mother Courage. (Unity.)— The Devil Peter. (Arts.) — More Like Strangers. (Royal Court.) The balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities; of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty' and fresh- ness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self- possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or. vehement.
COLERIDGE'S definition of the poetic imagination —undoubtedly the greatest critical subordinate clause in the whole history of literature—is also the perfect definition of the dramatic imagination. Come to think of it, it is the all-purpose portman- teau Platonic ideal for everything and everybody —including a critic. Especially the bit about 'ever awake.' But to attempt to measure my week in the theatre by this giant standard is like trying to weigh a kiddy-car on a fifteen-ton weighbridge. The needle flicks back beyond zero.
Let us consider first of all Ted Willis's new dramatic pamphlet Hot Summer Night. It is bY no means a despicable job of work and I turned up at the New Theatre ridiculously prejudiced in its favour. Mr. Willis is the original do-it- yourself-in-your-own-backyayd playwright. He began as a party laureate trundling around the stage an entire branch meeting of those faceless, concrete-filled proletarians from a Daily Worker cartoon, the clenched fist saluting the clenched mind, while a false dawn glowed through the kitchen window. But overproduction, though it may be the ruin of genius, is often the salvfl. tion of talent. Ted Willis has made himself a good writer by writing badly, just as a child learns to walk by falling on its face. He has been his own Professor Higgins. And his screenplaY for Woman in a Dressing Gown, despite a certain Crude glibness of style, was a genuine work at art. In Hot Summer Night, he has both a theme and a situation from a world he knows well. The theme is race prejudice. It is dramatised through the conflict of loyalties when a tough trade unionist, fighting the colour bar in the factorY, finds his wife introducing the colour bar into his home. He faces the classic question—would you let your daughter marry a black man? Btlt. Mr. Willis does not seem to realise that the only answer to that is another question—which black man? (Or perhaps—which daughter?) Rot Summer Night is based on anti-racialism almost as one-sided and dogmatic as the racialism it attacks. It lacks 'the balance or reconciliation of 0Pposite or discordant qualities.' Drama is a f°11° of prize-fighting and the champion must have a challenger as big as he is. But nobody --except cranks with muscles on the brain—is In favour of an absolute colour bar. The fight is over before it begins. If the West Indian had been insolent, scruffy, noisy, vain and deceitful, there. would have been a choice of attitudes, a Conflict of sympathies, a clash of convictions. There would have been drama. Mr. Willis does, 'fldeed, introduce some such complications in the third act. The one argument on the side of the Ne8 'o-hating mother is supplied by the example °f another local white girl married to a West Indian. When this girl is forced to say whether she vould marry again now, knowing what she does about the cruel unspoken apartheid of aritam today, she cannot make up her mind. And she hands back the poisoned question to the Mother—Would you marry your husband again?' Rut this new and poignant twist comes too late tobe an integral part of the whole action of the drama. It remains just a melodramatic device to liven up a dying act. It is melodramatic because It is inserted for an effect, not for a cause.
Naturally Ted Willis has caught much of the surface of working class—the repetitive barbed argu nents over trivia, the deck-chairs by the scull:ry drain, the cups of tea and chutney Sandwiches, the cosy squalor of the one living- room. But he misses that picturesque bad-taste fantasy wit of good working-class talk which is almost invariably debased on the British stage 1010 stereotype 'Cockney humour.' Too much of the dialogue is a cliché of a cliché. Nor does the production lift the play above the level of the living newspaper. Here, too, I am biased in favour of that excellent producer Peter Cotes. (When I resigned my job as television critic, did. he not write me a letter of regret comparing me to the young Bernard Shaw? I was aiming at the time to be a mature Kenneth Tynan, but, ao matter.) But this is one of the most badly lighted plays I have ever seen in the West End, With lights as declamatory and unsubtle and heav v-handed as an old-fashioned claque. The Mother is played by Joan Miller. Now Mrs. Cotes has lever written me a letter of praise, though I have often intended to write her one. But not for Hot Summer Night. She acts as if she were aiming to win the Old Girl's Gold Medal from RADA, as if she were determined to show that She vere an actress pretending to be a woman rather than a woman being a woman. Joan Miller has almost too much technique. Andr6e Melly as the daughter has hardly enough to get her through the play. She can shrug her shoulders helplessly, make vague circular motions with her hands and nod her retrousse nose pathetically as if each word were a dewdrop to be shaken Ott But these mannerisms, plus a monotonous, thin voice, are not sufficient to colour a tram- parent character. John Slater is as excellent as ever as the bully-boy union organiser—like Abraham in shirt sleeves. Harold Scott is a real old man from the Buildings. Lloyd Reckord as the West Indian is hampered by the insistence 0f both author and producer that he must be twice as sunny and smiling and endearing as everyone else in case the audience is tempted to saY--No. I wouldn't let him marry my daughter.' But perhaps the greatest weakness of casting and produCtion and writing lies in the playing of the neighbour. Joyce Howard makes her so snivelly, so wet and whining, that in any decent self- respecting working-class neighbourhood some- b°dY would surely have pushed her into the canal, or in front of a tram, before she was old enough to be seduced.
These are harsh words and I do not suppose that anyone will thank me for writing them. Audiences are even more touchy about tough criticism than actors are. But after all, everybody concerned—including me—is being- paid to take the theatre seriously. When an art ,falls into decadence, the critics go first. So I must add that at the Unity Theatre there is a performance of Brecht's Mother Courage—that tedious old sequence of Marxist lantern slides—which is pathetic even by amateur standards. That at the Arts Theatre there is a long-winded trial play with flashbacks (The Devil Peter) which makes even murder seem dull, with' an endleSsly spouting prosecutor who seeins everlastingly about to dis- appear up his own argument. And for one night at the Royal Court last week there was an acci- dentally funhy parody of all those American plays abotit the miseries of- having a drunk in the family. Phil Brown directed this with his sure touch for hotting up meaningless and embarrass- ing flurries of tension every ten minutes. There was one brilliant performance by John Bay as a bootlegger, but otherwise the evening offered little except to lovers of film-star imitations. It was called More Like Strangers. It should have been called Mother Dutch Courage.
Previous page
