Kenneth Hurren on the Hallmarks of failure
Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind, translated by Edward Bond; National Theatre Company (Old Vic Theatre, Waterloo Road) The Confederacy by Sir John Vanbrugh; with Dora Bryan, Peggy Mount, Peter Gilmore (Chichester Festival Theatre) Pericles by William Shakespeare (?); Prospect Theatre Company (Her Majesty's, Haymarket) As to what is to become of the National Theatre, in which so many wild hopes of the international prestige of the British theatre are sweetly and expensively reposed, we can but pray. I confess to have been uneasy about the future of the place ever since the arbitrary replacement of Lord Olivier by Peter Hall as the head man, though my dismay was occasioned more, perhaps, by the manner of the change, and regret that Olivier was not to stay to guide his company and his policies into the new building in 1975, than by any specific lack of confidence in his successor. Even the indifferent record of Hall since his assumption of full control could not be said to be, necessarily, a positive portent.
The production last week of Wedekind's Spring Awakening, though, could not but aggravate my qualms; for this is a piece that the National Theatre considered once before. That was in 1965, And the fact that the decision was taken eventually not to bring the play into the repertory provoked some small controversy that everyone seems now to have for • gotten. It was done instead at the Royal Court, when it was instantly obvious that the work was no loss
fo -fh-e-NatiOnal', and it seems no more than a desperate perversity on Hall's part to reverse that previous and sound decision. That it is now possible (since the abolition of censorship) to stage the play in full is irrelevant to the issue: the previously forbidden scenes add little beyond a certain tawdry emphasis to a point that is already made at inordinate length, and I fear this is one of those sad instances of a work's acquiring a spurious reputation in liberal
circles by the mere fact of being _ . banned.
There are moments here when the absurdity of Wedekind's ideas of characterisation have their antique attractions, and even some, I suppose, when the play rises above its mercilessly proselytising purposes to a fragment of genuine dramatic feeling; but on the whole I feel able to commend Spring Awakening only to those who combine high tolerance for ponderously discursive dramawith a special, even spectacular, interest in the repressive conventidnSand attitudes of provincial German society, in the 1890s.
It is specifically concerned with the conceivably disastrous effect of this environment on young adolescents learning to cope with developing sexuality. Wedekind wrote the play at the age of twenty-six when himself infatuated with the pleasures of the flesh (he expressed the hope that his daughter would grow up to be a whore, an unrivalled example of a man's having the courage of his convictions), and I daresay he was justified in his strictures on a society that denied them. Nowadays, up here on the reverse swing of the pendulum, they have only the remote urgency of a telegram addressed to your grandmother that turns up in an
old trunk. .
The quality of the performance is variable, too. As the adolescent victims, Peter Firth and Michael Kitchen confirm much of the promise they have previously displayed, and so, to some degree, does Veronica Quilligan (though she has sometimes an almost shifty knowingness that is at serious odds with the innocence attributed to her); and I liked Beryl Reid's troubled mother, firmly evading her daughter's questions about conception; but among the rest there are performances that range from the merely inadequate to the actively embarrassing. If Peter Hall is not too absorbed in administrative matters, he might advantageously have a look at the way his director, Bill Bryden, has handled the masturbation scene and consider whether the placing of the central figure in it is dictated by dramatic logic or by prurient whim; and another at a scene involving schoolmasters and consider — even granting the woefulness of the caricatures provided by Wedekind and the translator, Edward Bond — whether the performance of it belongs on any professional stage, let alone this one.
The incumbency of another new man in charge, Keith Michell at Chichester, has begun quite as depressingly. The catastrophically misconceived inaugural production of Pirandello's Tonight We Improvise is now joined in repertory by a revival of Vanbrugh's The Confederacy, which has almost nothing to commend it to anyone except an unusually indiscriminate collector of period curiosities. Written in 1705, when Vanbrugh, having for some years devoted himself to architecture, was plainly out of theatrical practice, it parades a shopworn Restoration commotion of would-be adulterers, coquettish but compliant ladies, ardent moneygrubbers and social-climbers, but no felicity of phrase nor sharpness of wit. It can do no more than pass away an hour or two of a country evening for theatregoers of indulgent tastes who, though they may find no offence in it, are unlikely to delight in anything other than Dora Bryan's rather splendidly disdainful lady of fashion.
There is more to beguile in the rare London appearance of Pericles, offered vivaciously as a play-within-a-play in a vaguely contemporary male brothel. The fragments generally conceded to be authentic Shakespeare are sensitively done by Derek Jacobi and Marilyn Taylerson, and since most of the rest is tedious confusion, it is hard to raise a valid objection to the humours of the gaudy drag-ball that the director, Toby Robertson, has arranged to take one's mind off it.
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