Arts
More words than action
Peter Jenkins
American Buffalo (Cottesloe) Flying Blind (Royal Court) The animal in question is on the flip side of a nickel which Donny, a junk shop keeper in Chicago, sells to a rich coin collector and then plans to steal back with the rest of his collection. The American buffalo became extinct as a result of greed and greed is the subject of David Mamet's play in which three characters bring American business morality to bear upon the organisation of a crime which you know is not going to succeed. There is a hopeless air about all three of them from the start: Teach, a jumpy psycopath who after an incident involving half a piece of toast at the neighbourhood café says, 'The only way to reach these people is to kill them,' and Bobby, a wide-eyed boy, Whom Don is lovingly apprenticing to life and to crime. The play climaxes routinely in violence of a nasty kind but a violence made to seem so inevitable by the air of gathering frustration that it works theatrically and is necessary.
This is a play in which everything is in the Speech. Mamet writes American as it is sPoken, or barely spoken, a kind of lurid verbal impressionism, lacking in syntax, articulate and inarticulate in erratic spurts. The author is an exemplar of what might be called a new naturalism in which ruthless accuracy of language is the construct of reality. He has been compared with Harold Pinter but that doesn't seem right to me: Pinter's characters say the first thing that comes into the author's absurd head Whereas Mamet's obey the logic of human banality; maybe we are accustomed to think Of Pinter when we think of junk.
The trouble with naturalism is that it tends towards the inconsequential, to disappear in its own detail. American Buffalo avoided the trap, I thought, but only just. I am told that in New York Teach was played as an older man and more violently than by Jack Shepherd who in the early part of the Play had me wondering whether he was an experienced psychopath or a zany jokster. The play would be stronger if it were clearer sooner that the former is the case. Otherwise the direction by Bill Bryden does justice to a play which may become established as a genre masterpiece. Dave King, as Donny, got nearest not only to an American accent but, more important, to the rythmns of the speech. Michael Feast gave Bobby the appealing innocence which enables the Play to rise above its sordid detail and end in an affirmation of love. Grant Hicks designed the perfect junkshop.
Flying Blind was over-contrived, I kept thinking, and yet it kept working on the
stage at the Court, either in spite of itself or because of itself. The play is set, unpromisingly, in Belfast. Dan Poots sells tranquilisers for a living and lives by shutting out the sounds of the troubles with headphones through which he listens to Charlie Parker records. Violence has played havoc with the sex life of the province and Liz, his wife, has gone without for six months; she summons an old flame from London, Michael, a lecturer in sociology. It turns out he can't do it either when he tries with Carol the babysitter and she has difficulties herself which may have to do with her Protestant potty training. Her father used to stand outside demanding to know 'Did you do your duty?' Bertha, the randy fortyyear-old from next door, can still do it when she gets the chance but her husband prefers watching the colour television at his mother's. Politics was Boyd's think and he can't do that any more. You see they are all impotent in one way or another, just like Charlie Parker who martyred himself with heroin, neither fighting nor submitting to white society. Dan identifies with him.
Everybody is jumpy all the time. When two men from the gas board arrive the first thought is a hold up. They're just as jumpy themselves, as when a toaster pops up in the kitchen. It is an ordinary Saturday morning in Belfast. Everyone is on pills. Dan stays out drinking and neglects his family; he loves his little daughter but bringing her up to be either a little Catholic or a little Protestant is more than he can bear. He escapes into Parker from his wife too. There is a great deal of pistol-penis symbolism. Boyd arrives with a revolver. 'It's like having a permanent erection' he tells Liz. He and she try to make it upstairs while her husband is held at gunpoint in the kitchen, tied up with his alto sax in hand. Boyd's gun turns out not to be loaded. Dan's flaccid member is on display for the greater part of Act Two. Turned on by the violence which by now has erupted (and perhaps by the thought of his wife upstairs in bed with Boyd) he at last manages it with the athletic Bertha in his daughter's Wendy house. All of this sex is going on — more talk than action — as rival gangs of Protestant and Catholic gunmen arrive to bring their feud into Dan's front room, forcing it upon his distracted attention. Both lots of gunmen are comically hopeless as well as tragically inadequate; they're impotent too. But in the end some guns do go off and bodies pointlessly litter the stage.
Bill Morrison's play, which was earlier produced at the Everyman, Liverpool, has been described as a farce but it came over to me as both more and less than that. He
seemed to me to be using the manners of a bedroom farce to bring home the utter tragedy of the situation. It is the reality which is the farce. The play works much better in Act II when the bedroom doors start slamming than in Act I when there are too many speeches of an expository kind, characters explaining to other characters things they ought already to know. I don't believe that Bertha, not even in troubled Belfast, would come round on a midSaturday morning to give Liz a positionby-position account of her afternoon in bed with a strange man. Do girls really talk like that together? And there are some pretty yucky lines in the piece such as Dan's to Liz after her bed with Boyd: 'How dare you behave like a person instead of a wife?' In spite of its mixture of styles — from kitchen sink to bidet — and the uncomfortable way in which it mixes the emotions Flying Blind is the work of a genuine talent who's problem is having too much he wants to say, which is preferable to too little.
Peter Postlethwaite achieved the bewildered intensity of Dan but we could have done with less of Peter's Peter. Rachel Bell, she stripped only to the wasit, was outstanding as the bouncy big Bertha but the whole cast was excellent, the direction — by Alan Dossor — fast and sharp and the set — designed by John Gunter — provided the sunny, homely scene for such macabre intrusions, as well as the indispensible doors.
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