THEATRE
Mum's the word
HILARY SPURLING
Café La Mama at the Royal Court The Friends (Roundhouse) The week in which the Moscow Arts com- pany leaves England, a week which also sees the end of this year's World Theatre Season, is bound to leave the London theatre a trifle flat. It is not that the best of this country's theatre is not a match for the world's best, only that one grows spoilt by the riches spilled out week by week so rapidly from Mr Daubeny's amazing bag. One company which has so far escaped his bag is the Café La Mama which, on its fifth European tour, has been the guest of the Royal Court for the past three weeks.
This company is now nine years old and has, like the Living Theatre of painful memory, a prodigious reputation for bold, fierce and fertile artistic revolution which, again like the Living Theatre, its present air of exhausted insipidity scarcely justifies. It is, however, more than likely that the singu- lar clumsiness of these actors (who seem strangely unpractised in matters so simple as crossing a stage, let alone in occupying it with any kind of visual or physical command) and the curious drabness of their texts are, by their own standards, immaterial; the com- pany produces up to forty new plays in one year, and disapproves of long runs on the grounds that `they tend to corrupt La Mama's principles by getting it involved in the success-failure hang-up.' One of the triumphs of this system is the absolute self- confidence of each member of this company which, at any rate in their second pro- gramme, is as engaging as it is surprising.
Leonard Melfi's Cinque (a Western prob- ably as absorbing to perform as it is enervat- ing to watch) contains one captivating moment when, as the lights go down and the music stops, five bouncing, beaming cowboys turn ashen pale and reach with shaking hands for cigarettes to clamp between locked jaws. Nothing elsewhere in Mr Melfi's piece lives up to this deftly observed and absurdly solemn wistfulness. And nothing in Adrienne Kennedy's Rats Mass even. approaches such dexterity: this is a vehicle for strong feeling on life, hard times 3nd sex which, though evidently sincere and deeply held, is ex- pressed with that mixture of bathos, stri- dency and unconscious humour which made nineteenth century melodrama so alarming.
Similar elements are combined, in a rather more tepid solution, in The Friends, Arnold Wesker's latest and perhaps his saddest play in which a band of ageing helpmeets, push- ing forty and 'festering with gloom', dis- cover to their cost, firstly, that they have quite lost youth's fine, careless rapture; and, secondly, that 'the streets are filled with strange young people'. There is something rather touching about the incredulity and grief with which Mr Wesker voices this lamentable fact. The play itself consists of a selection of his recent thoughts, cobbled fairly loosely onto the plot of La Boh?ine: the production is, however, worth a visit for the delicate mockery of Ian Holm's perform- ance as the leading friend, and for Nicholas Georgiadis's ravishing set which, with Mark Pritchard's lighting, explores for almost the first time the magnificent visual
properties of the Roundhouse.
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