Theatre
Blue Murder (Touring)
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Almeida)
The Handyman (Chichester)
Appalling manners
Sheridan Morley
Not since Michael Frayn's Noises Off (and that must be more than a decade ago) has there been a funnier backstage idea for a play than Peter Nichols's Blue Murder, currently on a national tour but amazingly still without a West End home in prospect. The idea is simple enough, and indeed owes a certain amount not only to Frayn but also to Orton and Pirandello and even that old standard theatrical farce Curtain Up.
What we have here are two linked one- act plays: the first, set in 1963 and entitled Foreign Bodies, is a country-house party parody in which an ostensibly respectable family are found to be underpinned by murder, prostitution, pederasty and assort- ed other crimes of the hearth. The second play, A Game of Soldiers, is set four years later in the office of the Lord Chamberlain just as he is about to lose his centuries-old powers of theatrical censorship.
The link is that the play for which he is being asked to give a performance licence is the one we have just seen; but Nichols is too agile and adept a dramatist just to leave it at all the old jokes about forbidden words and double-entendres and the farcical lunacy of having an old soldier assigned to protect the great British public by cutting out all the dirty bits of plays. Instead, we soon discover that the Chamberlain's own office is riddled with all the aforemen- tioned sins that he is trying to delete from Swinging Sixties scripts, and a manic collec- tion of bisexual mismatches is brilliantly played out by a hugely expert and versatile team led by Barry Foster (in and out of drag), Anton Rogers and Nicola McAuliffe.
Like all great farces, Blue Murder has at the last a very serious point to make: it is Nichols's view that the abolition of the Chamberlain as censor, while freeing up the territory and allowing almost total licence to writers, has also over the last 30 years devalued the trade, since writers are at their best when they have something to fight against or work their way deviously around.
This seems to me debatable, but what matters is that Nichols has crafted a mag- nificently agile double-bill which works equally well as a recent history of our the- atre seen through a series of distorting mir- rors. To have the same cast in both plays also gives a brisk and brilliant perspective to a comedy of appalling manners in which licence and licentiousness, hypocrisy and hilarity are wondrously married. Given that Blue Murder is the best if most complex farce of the decade thus far, it seems more than a little curious that it should be trudg- ing around the country still without any home in a West End which would be great- ly enriched by its arrival there.
At the Almeida (and moving to the Ald- wych from 12 November), Diana Rigg and David Suchet star in Howard Davies's immensely thoughtful and intelligent revival of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The author himself consid- ers this his long night's journey into day, and contributes a faintly disgruntled pro- gramme note regretting that it is still the I hear Georgie Porgie Pudding and Pie got life.' only play by which he is immediately recalled. But something odd is going on here: Rigg and Suchet are consummate actors, never better than when battling with each other or uniting in uneasy alliance to `get the guests' (in this case Lloyd Owen and Clare Holman) but we can never for- get that they are indeed just actors doing an expert job on a script which the years are beginning to make look a little repeti- tive and, at more than three hours with two intervals, sometimes unnecessarily circular. The first stage versions were more arid than this, and, although Davies has to a surprising extent humanised the script, so that we now really care about all four pro- tagonists in their doomed dance of marital death, the evening never approaches in sheer randy alcoholic magnificence the Burton-Taylor movie of 1966. The Burtons simply told us that that was how they were and we could bloody well get used to their appalling destructiveness of each other and anyone unwise enough to come between them. If we chose not to, that was our loss.
Over the last six weeks we have had at least four new plays dealing in some way with the Holocaust or its aftermath around Europe; the latest of these, at the Minerva, Chichester, is Ronald Harwood's The Handyman and it is even arguable that Harwood started the trend a year ago with his magnificent Taking Sides, about the Furtwangler affair and now triumphant with Daniel Massey on Broadway.
His second look at the post-mortem of the second world war is set in the present, in an English country-house where the faithful old gardening handyman is slowly revealed to have been a savage pro-Nazi, personally responsible for the killing of nearly a thousand Jews. Yet the play is not really about his guilt (which by the end of the evening is pretty well indisputable); instead, it's about the effect on contempo- rary British life of the new law which allows alien settlers to be charged, even half a century later, with war crimes which until now their lack of a British passport ironi- cally made impossible. Harwood raises two central questions early in the evening: does not the very phrase 'war crimes' somehow imply that it is possible to wage war legally, and is there really much to be gained by prosecuting half a century later very old men who can barely remember what they have done, let alone if they really did it?
For the debate at the heart of The Handyman, Harwood sets up various matchstick men and women to stand for every side of the argument: there's the yup- pie couple who employ the handyman (he, a pragmatic city banker, simply believes in the seigniorial duty of getting the best lawyer for one's staff, she, a distressed Catholic, believes it is morally wrong still to be pressing second world war charges); then there's the lawyer who, Portia like, demands justice at all costs, and a couple of eye-witnesses, one a crook and one a nun, who bear all too painful testimony to the handyman's sins. In the end this is not a great play, and even a rather inconclusive debate: but Frank Finlay's wonderfully weary performance deserves to be seen in London.
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