Theatre 1
The Black Prince (Aldwych)
Ghetto (Olivier)
Forces of darkness
Christopher Edwards
The Black Prince is an adaptation by Iris Murdoch of her own (and probably her best) novel. The central character is Brad- ley, a blocked soi-disant writer who has worked as a tax inspector while planning the great work. His fastidious evasion of human relationships expresses, or so he maintains, the necessary solitude of the artist. The great virtue in art is restraint, knowing when not to put pen to paper. Bradley has practised a virtuous sterility for years. But all is about to change. When we meet him he has just ditched his job and is on the point of escaping to the country to compose his masterpiece.
Bradley's efforts to get away are farcical- ly undercut by messy human reality. In a series of amusing and patterned interrup- tions, his doorbell and telephone announce crisis after crisis that prevent him from getting the taxi to Paddington. If it's not his wife-battering best friend Arnold, it's his own suicidal sister or his returning ex-wife. Pulled to the edge by all this disorder, he is sucked hopelessly over when, in the middle of an ad hoc supervision on Hamlet, he realises he is in love with Arnold's 20- year-old daughter Julian. Unblocked at last, he succumbs to the 'black Eros' of creativity and discourses freely on art, nature, the self, Shakespeare, morality and much else. Better still, the affair and its tragi-comic consequences cause him to write the story we are watching.
Ian McDiarmid gives one of his best performances to date as Bradley. He beautifully catches the character's shrewd, spinsterish intelligence, his euphoria and his eerie subjection to the forces of Eros. The cast around him are first-rate too. But while there is much to admire in both the writing and the performances, I found myself disengaged. If poetry is what gets lost in translation, then emotional weight and narrative complexity are what have gone astray in this transposition of novel to stage. We were never really made aware enough that the drama unfolding before us was Bradley's own artistic account of his life — a point crucial to the book. Nor do Iris Murdoch or her director Stuart Burge manage to lift the play beyond the conven- tions of middle-class tragi-comedy — although her wit and intelligence are sever- al cuts above the usual run of self- consciously smart repartee you find in this genre. The evening is enjoyable and accomplished, but admirers of her art will register a note of disappointment.
Ghetto is a play pieced together by Joshua Sobol from the awful and heroic events covering a two-year period in the Jewish quarter of Vilna. CoraIled by the Nazis in 1941, and mostly wiped out in 1943, the occupants subsisted, bartered, collaborated or appeared to collaborate with their masters in order to preserve some of their numbers. They also, remark- ably enough, founded a theatre. This production, which has many scenes of great power and realised life, vividly marks out the moral dilemma of collaboration. The ghetto is led by Gens (John Wood- vine), a Zionist. His very title in the ghetto. Chief of Jewish Police, suggests an ambivalence. When the SS Officer Kittel (Alex Jennings) demands that numbers have to be reduced, Gens has the terrible job of deciding who lives and who dies.
The production concentrates on the rela- tions between master and victim. Kittels is an 'artistic' SS officer with a caressingly sadistic nature. He loves Gerschwin and delights in watching his Jewish charges sing and dance. It is this very intermingling of Nazi and Jew that gives the work its uneasy tone. Kittel is full of unexpected reactions. A ventriloquist and his dummy are allowed considerable licence to mock the Nazis. A jackboot version of the 'Ode to Joy' is received with delight as accomplished sa- tire. But escape from the ghetto is not amusing, and when his favourite singer leaves to join the partisans, this is the cue for massacre. There are moments in this brilliantly staged evening when you ques- tion its very theatricality and musical accomplishment. At times the spectacle and music seem diverting for their own sake, and anything that diverts attention away from the underlying horror of the experience cannot help but seem question- able. But, ultimately, what prevails is a sense of the celebration of a spirit of resistance. Nicholas Hytner directs.
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