Theatre
Off-Centre
By ALAN BRIEN
The Lion in Love. (Royal Court.)—Toad of Toad Hall. (Westminster.)— The Coral King. (Ru- doff Steiner Hall.)
MISS SHELAGH DELANEY is a twenty-two-year-old girl from Salford and she is an expert Observer of sixteen-year-old girls from Salford. She is one up on Margaret Mead because she can describe coming of age in Salford, and growing up in new England, from the indigenous viewpoint of a cannibal turned anthropologist. What was so fresh and alive and exciting about A Taste of Honey was the genuineness of her vision of her world. Here was a play which owed nothing to the local rep., or How To Write For The Theatre, or a WEA course on Master Craftsmen in Drama. It was influenced by the actual cul- ture of the working-class young today—the women's magazine daydream, the fleapit epic, the palais poetry, the copywriter's wit. A Taste of Honey was written in the idiom of free cinema rather than commercial theatre—only the cen- tral figure of the pregnant 'schoolgirl was con- ceived in flesh and blood. The other characters Were grotesques who swam in and out of focus from the Loch Ness of her subconscious. They were joke figures, cartoon personalities, night- mare masks from an adult world the heroine had never explored.
The Lion in Love has pretensions to objec- tivity. Miss Delaney is trying to stand outside her north-country environment with a notebook and report her subjects with only one foot in the door. She has also been exposed to the theatre from the wings—undoubtedly the least valuable angle from which to see any drama. Taste of Honey was full of the cliches of the workshop and the office. The Lion in Love has added many of the cliches of 'Theatre Work- shop and the box-office. Like Chekhov, Miss Delaney has a sharp ear for banalities. But she does not distinguish between what is old and Yet inevitable and what is old and yet expend- able. Familiar phrases can be played like cards O n the stage—the patterns may be traditional.
but the combinations must be ever new and un- expected. You cannot hold up a seven of diamonds and expect to get a laugh. Miss Delaney still cannot believe that most of us have come across 'death warmed up' or 'pull the other leg, it's got bells on,' etc., before. But any- one with his wits switched on can overhear this on any bus. And what is worse, dramatically, he has already been exposed to just such pub rhetoric and pavement epigrams in other plays a! the Royal Court and Stratford East. The re- ligious crank with the board, 'Repent While There Is Still Time,' for example, was an old Joke in the days of early Ealing Films, and it has been flogged to death in a dozen working- class plays since. The same goes for the elegy about the sweet shop and the pawnbroker's and the tobacconists which once stood• on this very site.
The young girl is off-centre in The Lion in Love. She is still tenderly and wryly observed— and Patricia Healey plays her with exactly the right edgy, perky, dewy sympathy. She per- fectly conveys just those qualities of sexy inno- cence and shrewd naivety, expressed through every twist of her slimly pneumatic body and with every potato-in-the-mouth croak, which eluded Billie Whitelaw in Progress to the Park. But we are never allowed to wear her eyes as spectacles. Her father and mother and brother and grandfather are no longer distorted shapes glimpsed in a fun-fair mirror—they are obvious, repetitive telly-types who become more boring as they become more realistic. The neighbour gossips are caricatures who live in the Stratford East prop cupboard and can be rented out to any Casey's Court comedy. Even Joan Little- wood might think them broad for their depth, and if Noel Coward had dared to include them in a play he would have been publicly beaten by Lindsay Anderson. As for the prostitute, bravely and spiritedly played by Renny Lister, can Miss Delaney ever have seen a provincial whore except from a train? No fast filly half so outrageously nubile as Miss Lister would waste her time on a suburban street corner, and even in the lounge of the Midland Hotel she could hardly dress like.a saloon-girl in a Western.
On the whole, though, The Lion in Love is about real people in real dilemmas. The trouble is that we never get closer to them than across- the-backyard-wall gossip. I'm sure they would do this, with this accent, in those words, and with such excuses and justifications. But second- hand life is just not good enough any more. A playwright's job is to strip off the skin and bare the nerves, to let us see the heart beating and the brain faltering, under the glare of the lights in his operating theatre. A Lion in Love is a splen- did title—but this lion does not know the mean- ing of the word, and he never had any teeth to be extracted or claws to be clipped. An ungainly and jerry-built set does not help, nor does a pi oduction which is alternately heavy-handed and light-fingered. Miss Delaney's second play suggests that her reach exceeds her grasp at this moment. There is indeed a place for her in my heaven—but not yet, not yet.
The three dramatic critics under the age of nine who accompanied me to some of the Christ- mas shows vastly enjoyed both Toad of Toad Hall and The Coral King. Occasional bouts of heavy breathing attacked me, but their ice-cream melted unnoticed in their hands, their chocolates cascaded uncounted down the necks of the adults in the row in front, as they underwent all the splendours and miseries of the people on the stage. Toad has a stronger story and a hero who in his greed, cowardice, evasiveness and boasting most faithfully embodies all the infant ambitions. But The Coral King has a patina of lucid poetry and sensible magic which also appeals to youthful imaginations. Only sadly television- debauched children are likely to come away dis- appointed, and most will be surprisingly grate- ful. I know managements hate critics saying this —but many parents are put off visits to the theatre by fear of inability to obtain tickets— both of these shows could probably seat many more audiences than they are at present attracting.
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