Contemporary Arts
Psychodramatics
( ARDS OF IDRNTITY. By Nigel Dennis. (Royal COMO—NIGHT OF THE FOURTH. By Jack Racy and Gordon Harbord. (Westminster.) 'I III. lirSI act is unusually promising. Instead of employing the standard devices to tell us who's who and what's what, the author leaves us puzzled. Whether this is deliberate, or because he assumes we will have read the novel, I do not know; but it works. Curiosity soon begins to breed expectancy, heightened as the charade grows more maniacal; and gradually a pattern emerges. Captain Mallett (Michael Gwynn, excellent as ever) has a plan to hypnotise visitors to the manse, to induce amnesia, and to make them thick of them- selves as cook, butler, gardener, and land-girl; thereby obtaining for himself not only a fully manned servants' hall, but also a bank balance (cook and butler, in ' their new identities, forget they had possessed one; and their signatures are eminently forgeable). Circe, who turned her guests into animals, was clearly less wise in her generation. The idea is good; the production is good; the playing is good; and if we do not laugh quite as freely as the act seems to deserve, this can plausibly he attributed to our bemused Shaftesbury Avenue stolidity. We are not quite accustomed to such richness; it will take us time to appreciate its savour.
But the second act reveals that there is some- thing missing—that the play lacks a core. It is as if the author has lost interest in his original creation, and gone on (as well a novelist might) to a larger lunacy; he switches us from the servants' hail to the breakfast room, there to meet a Psychodological Association, under whose auspices the cards of identity are being shuffled. This weird Freudian body is in the style of the club in The Man who was Thurs- day; it might have been dreamed up by a disciple of Gurgieff, after reading Trilby; and its prospects, theatrically speaking, are mouth- watering. But it turns out a sad let-down. The Association relies on psychodrama, rather than discussion; the members act out their case histories; and the acts are irrelevant, or second-hand--in the case of the clever-enough skit on the BBC commentary, fiftieth-hand. The interminable scene finally has to be brought to a close by an explosion; presum- ably nobody could think of any sillier way of ending it. Though we may lament the means, we are thoroughly grateful for the interrup- tion.
The third act adds little. There is just enough of the servants' hall to suggest what an enter- taining play could have been made on that theme alone; but then we are whisked up- stairs again for more turns; and George Devine's, the best of them, only helps to take us farther from the original theme. The play does not so much end as disintegrate; even the (quite substantial) section of the audience who had remained to cheer were temporarily discomfited by the feebleness of the final cur- tain, to judge by the time the applause took to build up.
In retrospect, though, I am more grateful for having been irritated by Cards of Identity than for being mildly pleased by dozens of better constructed, smoother, orthodox plays. There is much that is wrong. The satire wavers on different levels; and it needs somebody to take it by the scruff and trim off the superfluous catchpenny tricks. It lacks, too, an inner consistency—the sort that Chesterton could impose on his nightmares. But the talent is there; once again the Royal Court has per- formed its expressed function, and pulled into the Theatre somebody who should sooner or later be an asset to it.
Night of the Fourth also deals in psycho- dramatics; and its subject—whether a murderer is a criminal to be punished or a diseased man to be cured—is topical; not to say urgent. The original author, or his two adaptors, decided that the arguments are likely to be a little over the heads of English audiences; so they have disguised them in melodrama. But as a whodunit it is too riddled with improbabilities for addicts to take it seriously. There is a neat penultimate twist, calculated to deflate any- body who thinks he has found the answer through close attention to the programme; but the ultimate twist is of a crushing banality. As a psychiatric tract it is laughable. But the real trouble lies in the flat dialogue. Consisting as it does largely of interrogation, it is not easy to memorise, and there was much under- standable uncertainty over lines. In fact, of the cast, only Michael Shepley looked comfort- able. I can hardly imagine him looking any-
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