Contemporary Arts
Tinkling Symbols
The Sport of My Mad Mother.
By Ann Jellicoe. (Royal Court.) LAST week I suggested that King Lear might be theatrically less of a slow-burn and more of a thun- der-flash if it were produced as a modern surrealist fantasy. (Judg- ing by the way some of my cor- respondents frothed at this mild' joke, it is now blasphemous to criticise even stage royalty.) The point I was trying to make in my frivolous journalistic way was that Lear was more interest- ing as Man than as a man. The harder the producer tries to make rile believe that 1 am watching the decay of an actual individual, who reacts in -a convincing, coherent and realistic manner to his troubles, the less moving and enlightening the spectacle becomes. That one bad- tempered, insensitive, vain, senile booby of a tribal chief is packed off to the workhouse without a knight to his back is hardly a tragic theme. But as the archetypal Father devoured alive by his offspring, as the eternal abdicating Boss mocked by his former servants, as Everyman opening a strange door and treading on a step which isn't there, Lear is more real than you are.
It is the heresy of today that art should mirror people exactly as they are with all their pettiness, incoherence, long-windedness and repetitiveness —it might be called the Marty Syndrome. Dialogue aims to sound like the playback. of a hidden tape-recorder. Action imitates life as it is seen from the cabinet de voyeur. The whole theory of television as an art, for example, is based on the.belief that if only the house of a typical family could be secretly wired for sound and vision, then the perfect all-purpose tragical-comical-historical- pastoral drama would unroll until doomsday. I believe on the contrary that there is only one place for 'real people' in the theatre—and that is in the audience.
Miss Ann Jellicoe in The Sport of My Mad Mother has written what might be called 'a modern surrealist fantasy' : an exercise in theatri- cal collage. Just as the painters tacked scraps of newspaper and torn menus on to their canvas, she has worked into her text the chanted directions from a home permanent-wave kit and a pastiche of a rock-'n'-roll song. The intention in each case is presumably the same—to prove that the most intractable gobbets of the real world can be trans- muted by art into art. And she has similarly taken the surface appearance of some contemporary characters—an American social worker, an Australian hell-cat, two South London Teds and their doxy—and pressed them into service as symbols. As director as well as author, Miss Jellicoe has given her own bitter and antic jere- miad just the sort of production I was sketching in for King Lear last week.
Unlike some critics I see absolutely no objec- tion in principle to mixing in every kind of stage convention. The characters talk sometimes to each other, sometimes to the audience, sometimes to a drummer on the side of the stage, and sometimes to the stage-hands and electricians. They sing, dance, chant in unison, moan in couplets. They mime, mug and declaim. It is all rather like the last drunken night of University revue—full of old jokes, crude props, high spirits and low comedy. And often the effect is very funny— sometimes even rather eerie and arresting. But as a play with any precise relevance to any human problem, dilemma or situation, The Sport of My Mud Mother is a flop.
The production is not at fault. Miss Jellicoe has devised some ingenious and spectacular methods of keeping her ideas juggling in the aft like Indian clubs. But the clubs are invisible or else so hollow and light that they go up in the air and are carried off by the wind. With the best possible will in the world, I was unable to discover what she had to say. The clues which were under- lined, both in text and production, with the heavi- est black pencil were exactly those which were most cqptic and impenetrable. Why should Greta (according to the programme note 'an irrespon- sible life-force') be a raucous Australian with long hair dyed the colour of dried tomato ketchup? What purpose was there in wrapping Caldaro ('Knowledge and Science') as a newspaper parcel? Who is the fieldmouse of a waif in the old army greatcoat who mutters lines of almost Words- worth silliness which go something like 'Me all soft and loose I lie, Looking empty at the sky'?
Miss Jellicoe has been compared to Ernst Toller, Thornton Wilder and T. S. Eliot. There seem to me to be nearer and less ponderous influences at work a lot of the time. The human parcel, and the parade of the Guys, the unexpected bouts of song and dance, the infectious spurts of make-believe which become reality, are like half-memories of John Cranko. The parody of the schoolroom (Please, may I be excused?"No. Stay behind and fill up the ink-wells') might be word for word from an old Will Hay film. The perming instructions which turn into a jolly concert party chorus derive from At the Drop of a Hat. It is possible to practise collage so passionately that there is no room left on the canvas for any of your own paint. Miss Jellicoe does not carry her magpietude quite to that extent. But it is noticeable that where fi her observation is most direct and naturalistic—as in the earlier scenes of the Teds' squabble for power—symbol and reality chime most resound- ingly. together. Conversely, where the symbols get out of hand and start bossing around the charac- ters who embody them, her imagination is at its weakest and her dialogue at its dullest.
I am glad that I have seen The Sport of My Mad Mother, if only for the performance of Wendy Craig (an actress with guts as well as sex appeal) as Greta and Philip Locke (an actor with punch and intelligence) as the teenage executioner. But I doubt whether it is wise of the English Stage Company to project a spitball so violently into the eye of the middlebrows without ensuring some more powerful support from the eggheads. This is just the sort of well-meant but feeble gesture which could sound off the Beaverbrook leader- writers in pursuit (Should the Arts Council spend public money sponsoring such obscure drivel and pretentious nonsense when, etc. . . .') and pro- voke a revolt among the private enterprise backers Man the chairman of the company tell me how Schweppes can possibly benefit from association with this obscure, etc ') The Royal Court is too precious a possession to risk for the sake of a play which anyone (except apparently the judges of the Observer play competition) could have seen was worth at most a Sunday evening tryout.
ALAN BRIEN
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