THEATRE
At the Coprocabana
KENNETH HURREN
With a fastidiousness as baffling as it was uncharacteristic, the promoters of a kindergarten prank called Pork, which was imported to the Roundhouse this week, decided at the last minute to omit one of the scenes in their show — a scene in which, my spies report, a bowl of excrement was upturned over the head of one of the characters. I can't say, I'm afraid, whether the actual defecation as well was to have taken place on the stage, but in any event I'm sorry they left out the item (the last thing to go, it seems, in an editing process that whittled down the original script from 200 hours to a mere, if seemingly interminable, two). It would, of course, and with only one slight revision, not only have provided the perfect climax to the proceedings, with a built-in comment rendering further criticism superfluous, but have given the work an artistic shape it presently lacks. The slight revision I have in mind is that there would be several bowls of fEaces, one to anoint each member of the cast.
The entertainment, if anything so witlessly repellent and enervatingly charmless may be so described, is the work of an American named Andy Warhol, reputedly some kind of artist, though plainly no kind of playwright. He has himself represented on the stage by a character in a wheelchair, a droning emotional cripple who compensates for his inadequacies by listening to and snapshooting the scatological fantasies of his neurotic associates, led by the eponymous Pork, an obese, unhappy girl apparently hooked on an anal narcotic, and a frizzy-wigged creature of indeterminate sex whose interests, though wholly cloacal, are remarkably varied within those limits. If Hercules were still around, Pork might have served him splendidly as a testing encore after the Augean stables job.
At a late stage, an actress named Suzanne Smith appears in the relatively coherent, if unendearing, role of Pork's mother, and I think I detected in her performance symptoms of a talent that is conspicuously missing in the rest of the company. There doesn't seem to be anything else to be usefully said about Pork — except perhaps that the set, in contrast to everything that goes on in it, is clinically white and reminded me, traumatically, of the one for Peter Brook's Dream — but I doubt whether I'm the right man for the job, anyway. They tell me that Kenneth Tynan, on television the other night, was lamenting the fact that theatre reviewers these days are getting too old for the stuff they have to appraise, and I see his point. The snag is that when
something like Pork comes up, an editor who wants conscientiously to arrange the right coverage is inevitably going to be frustrated by the child labour laws — even, that is, if he knows any literate fiveyear-old coprophiles.
By these lights, it's been a bad stanza right through for square peg reviewers confronted with a series of round hole productions. Too old for Pork, most of us are a shade too young for Show Boat, an almost prehistoric musical that has docked at the Adelphi, although one member of the craft — a man evidently blessed with total recall — remembers being suckled to the strains of the songs they were singing aboard the old Cotton Blossom ' in 1927. They were, and are, pretty good songs : tune for tune, this is one of the three best American show scores ever written, matching Gershwin's Porgy and Bess and Rodgers's Oklahoma!, the latter of which had the same librettist, Oscar HammerStein H, who had worked two decades earlier on Show Boat. He hadn't, then, quite grown into the fullness of his gifts as a lyricist (significantly, perhaps, the show-stopping number is the one he didn't write: Bill, written by P. G. Wodehouse and sung in the present revival by Cleo Laine), but his simple words fit snugly enough with 'Jerome Kern's music in things like Can't Help Lovin' That Man, Only Make Believe and Why Do I Love You? and he was a step or two ahead of his time with the Mississippi black man's sorrowful recognition of the status quo, 01' Man River.
That last song is beautifully rendered here by Thomas Carey — beautifully and very nearly incessantly, for it's the only song this distinguished singer has to occupy him. I can't think why the producers didn't bring in Ah Still Suits Me, which Kern and Hammerstein added to the score for the 1936 film version and which has rather more right in the show than After the Ball, an old sing-song standard by Charles Harris (not credited here, incidentally), which didn't get into the proceedings until the 1951 film version, and even then without much justification.
The book of the show, adapted from a novel by Edna Ferber, has come in for a lot of hard and loftily disdainful words, most of them probably supportable, but this is invariably the way with musical comedy, whose composers have had to bear a great many burdens more foolish than the adventures of Cap'n Andy and his boatload of itinerant entertainers. The production — directed by Wendy Toye — is dazzlingly extravagant, makes light of the potentially embarrassing naiveté of some of the dialogue, and is generally so pictorially fetching that it can be forgiven its somewhat anachronistic de-segregation of blacks and whites along the Mississippi in the chorus numbers. The singers, apart from Mr Carey and Miss Laine, include Lorna Dallas and Andre Jobin as the romantic leads, and a lithe sprite named Miguel Godreau dances exhilaratingly.
William Trevor's dramatization of his novel, The Old Boys, at the Mermaid, may touch a few chords of recognition among a more specialized group of veterans, though I can't help thinking that Trevor is exaggerating rather maliciously the element of retarded adolescence that endures in so many English public school men, so that their whole lives are a preoccupation with, recapitulation of, and regret for the passing of, that bygone time. The novel (which I haven't read) may well have had some touching point to make about these sad and insular little lives, and particularly about the desperate plight of a woman who has retained only a tenuous connection with her trolley after forty-odd years of marriage to one such permanent schoolboy, but in the dramatization, I'm sorry to say, these promising themes are always subordinate to a preposterous yarn about a blackmailing private detective. Matters were not much helped on the first night by Michael Redgrave, whose performance, as the principal Old Boy was a nerve-racking duet with the prompter.
The ideal reviewer for The Avengers, at the Prince of Wales, would be someone familiar with the television series on which it is based, a genial send-up, I've always understood, of the secret-agent thriller formula. I can only say that the stage manifestation, which may be attempting the same trick — with a suitably ludicrous plot about the outwitting of a villainous band of feminists whose plan for world conquest even Miss Greer might hesitate to endorse — struck me as pitifully laboured, and all the facetious bits of sex play, perhaps interpolated in an effort to measure up to the presumed sophistication of the playhouse, make for a very dismal evening indeed.
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