Arts

Fending off Charley's Aunt

John Spurling

The twenty years since the so-called Theatre Revolution of 1956 have been the most fertile period in the whole history of the British Theatre since the days of Shakespeare. If this has been a fairly well-kept secret, it is no doubt partly because the revolution in text, design and performance has so frequently had to adapt itself to prerevolutionary buildings. Critics, for instance, regularly write about plays as if they were films with live actors, yet the audience, the architecture and the artistic policy of a particular theatre are as integral to a play as they are irrelevant to a film.

This is not so much a criticism of critics as a reflection of the fact that they generally review London performances which are still most often confined to nineteenth-centurystyle theatres. Many of the provincial theatres, however, are new, while others have recently come under the management of a new generation of directors, so with the idea of sampling their wares and in the hope of recommending their virtues I've embarked on a short series of excursions.

Sheffield is a confusing city for the visitor, partly because it seems at first to be all through-roads, but even more because the many hills on which it stands play havoc with one's sense of direction. The Crucible Theatre, at the centre of the city, seems rather to keep its head down from outside. But from inside, the large foyer, boldly carpeted in stripes and lighted with huge windows, curves round the main auditorium at first-floor level to command a sweeping view of the up-and-down city with a bare hill behind and a magnificent sky-scape.

The Crucible was designed by Renton Howard Wood Associates and completed in 1971 to replace the old Playhouse and, so the story goes, to put Leeds's nose definitively out of joint. It is, however, much more than an instantly sympathetic modern building. The main auditorium, with a thousand seats, is the latest and most sophisticated (unless one includes the National's still unopened Olivier Theatre) in a line of thrust-stage theatres developed under the influence of Tyrone Guthrie. The pattern is that of an amphitheatre, but with the arc more closely enfolded round the stage, so that the focus, instead of being immediately in front of the back wall, is concentrated on the enclosed cockpit. Unlike its predecessor the Chichester Theatre, the Crucible actually makes one feel closer to the stage than one is.

One of the principal begetters of the Crucible was its first artistic director and a disciple of Guthrie, Colin George. His successor, Peter James, who has been in the job for eighteen months, was a founder of the Everyman Liverpool and helped start the Young Vic. He is voluble on the technical delights of his theatre but understandably most concerned, so early in his tenure, to attract audiences. There are many concessionary schemes in hand, including reduced prices for matinees and Mondays, vouchers in factories and a system of school-children bringing in their friends.

But increasing the number of patrons does not necessarily increase the funds available for their entertainment. On the contrary, since the seats are not priced economically, the cheapest way to run the theatre would be to keep it closed all the year round. The finances of the studio theatre (a small octagon to one side of the great octagon containing the main auditorium) illustrate the point neatly. Some of the more popular visiting fringe companies require a fee of £800 a week, whereas it is only possible at current prices and with full houses every night to take 050 a week in the studio. The purpose of attracting audiences, therefore, is less to take their money at the door than to give them the benefit of what they have already partly paid for (with always insufficient liberality) through subsidies from the Arts Council, the City of Sheffield and South Yorkshire County Council.

Sheffield audiences, however, have welldefined tastes. In the main theatre, the audiences like old favourites such as Hobson's Choice (82 per cent), She Stoops to Conquer (over 70 per cent), or new favourites riding on popular reputations such as Joseph and His Technicolor Dreamcoat (90 per cent) and Equus (70 per cent). They are unenthusiastic about Shakespeare, Shaw or Chekhov (all below 55 per cent) and brand-new plays turn them off completely.

Nonetheless, James insists on mounting one new play in the autumn season and another in the spring. He could hardly do less in such a notable building and he is adamant that he will not take the line of least resistance by confining experiment to the studio and hard-core favourites to the big theatre. It would indeed make Guthrie turn in his grave to think that the ultimate realisation of his theatrical concept should be given up for ever to Hobson's Choice and Charley's Aunt (69 per cent even through the hot summer).

The play I saw in the main auditorium has a Jonsonian flavour which might have

pleased Guthrie. David Turner's SemiDetached, originally a successful vehicle for a star performance by Olivier, shows the savage efforts of an insurance salesman to drag himself and his family up to the sunlit spaces of the affluent society. Laurie Dennett's set turns the thrust-stage into a kind of Ideal Home Exhibition of suburban splendour. A gleaming red Cortina pokes out of its garage beside the Georgian-stYle front door, which is approached by a proper gravel path leading up from the tunnel beneath our feet. A large area of hummocky lawn on several levels (made possible by the fifteen-foot well over which the stage is laid) boasts a 'Whirlwind Rider Line Lawnmower' as well as two sections of real railway-track and a petrol-driven bogeY. cart housed in another tunnel.

Bill Stewart attacks the main role with a sort of rodent energy, but remains curiously uncontaminated by the viciousness of his own words and actions, just as the production as a whole (by Peter James) settles for the laughs and broad caricature of surefire northern comedy and avoids any implication of real moral damage. Charley's aunt, one feels, has chased away Volpone.

The production in the studio was equallY well served by its set. Ibsen's last play When We Dead Awaken begins in a spa and moves with unabashed symbolism further and further up the mountain until the two central characters vanish into a storm at the top. The designer, Richard Brown, has thrown a steeply sloping ramp across one diagonal of the octagon to supply the main, acting area. The audience sits at small cafe tables, each furnished with glasses and a bottle of Perrier water.

It is a play which constantly treads the edge of absurdity; Ibsen's schematic simplicities have to be humanised by subtle characterisation. The protagonists are called upon to present two appearances simultaneously: a passionate young self trapped within the ghostly shell of a burnt out old age. Ian Giles's production achieves several fine moments on the outer, symbolic level : the entrance of a troll-like bearhunter with two huge black dogs, a single crescendo of abstract noise for the storm, the procession through the audience of a sinister white figure followed by a nun. The sincerity of his young cast is, alas, no match for the flickering shades of nihilism and idealism which give life to the inner level.

All the same, the play is a collector's item —exactly the sort of difficult rarity one would hope to see tried out in such a space. The main auditorium's turn for experiment will come in the autumn with the British premiere of Roger Planchon's piece about Al Capone, Mama Chicago. By then perhaPs Peter James will have them flooding in fronl

. the factories on his voucher system. But it seems more important in the long run that he should discover how to circle the square of his audience's taste, since, whether it meant to or not, Sheffield has treated itself to rather more than a local rep.

The second of four views of regional theatre by John Spurling will be published next week.