Theatre
Drag race
Kenneth Hurren Cycle Sluts (Broadway, Kilburn) La Grande Eugene (Round House) The Zykovs by Maxim Gorky; Royal Shakespeare Company (Aldwych) Miss Julie by August Strindberg (Greenwich)
Maybe everything will click into place when I discover Smirnoff CI thought transvest was a reversible waistcoat until . . .'). Just for now I'm nonplussed by these two shows I saw last week. No, not the Gorky or the Strindberg, though heaven knows I wasn't especially plussed by them, what with Mia Farrow in one, getting some elderly Russian gentleman in a rambunctious sweat despite looking like a retarded doll, and Susan Hampshire in the other as an English rose masquerading implausibly as deadly nightshade. These were the small beans of perplexity compared with Cycle Sluts and La Grande Eugene, a brace of recondite entertainments populated entirely by men, all of whom in the first and most of whom in the second are dressed in women's clothes. Why, I ask myself, are they not being investigated by the Equal Opportunities Commission, even if they are foreigners ? They seem open and shut cases.
This is especially so in regard to Cycle Sluts, in which the participants—though mysteriously described in a programme note as being of 'ambiguous gender'—are never closer to the female impersonation business than, say, Widow Twankey or Charley's Aunt. To that extent their appearance is briefly diverting, but there seems to me only minimal amusement to be derived from the sight of extravagant wigs, two-piece chorusgirl costumes and net stockings on chaps who are also aggressively bearded, hairychested and making a big thing, as it were, of the codpieces clamped over their frilly panties. Their show is said to have been the rage of Los Angeles 'at the famed Whiskya-Go-Go on the Sunset Strip', where I take it the patrons were amiably boozed by the time the cabaret came on; Kilburn High Road when the night is young would seem likely, on the face of it, to bring out a less indulgent mob. Even so, there were whinnies of glee rising from the fauteuils on opening night that give me pause, and it may be that there is more to the show than meets the eye. Hence my bafflement. What meets the eye, unremittingly, and threatens to detach the retina, is a succession of dance routines, as dismal in execution as they are dated in conception, to the accompaniment of raucously rendered songs, most of the words of which, probably mercifully, are amplified beyond the reach of the human ear—unlike those of the witlessly crude sketches which are not.
Only the transvestist element connects these woebegone capers with La Grande Eugene, an altogether smoother and lusher compendium which comes to us from Paris via Rome, Milan, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Munich, and its success is rather more comprehensible, although I'm still in some difficulty in trying to identify the specific appeal of the genre. This is another band of boys, dressed up most of the time in women's garments, and though some of them might easily pass for girls in a dim light, they generally spurn the traditional devices of female impersonators. Their show has a satirical and parodial edge, roaming all over the place from Venice to Haiti, and musically from Offenbach to Weill, in dedication to a fantasy of Baudelaire's, he being quoted as having said, 'I'd like to see the players wearing very high platform shoes, and masks more expressive than the human face, and speaking through megaphones; and the roles of women should be played by men.' Among the ladies played by lads here are Sarah Bernhardt (who, having once played Hamlet in an aberration of her own, can be regarded as fair game), Marlene Dietrich, Josephine Baker, Angela Davis, Mary Magdalene, miscellaneous whores and virgins and a line of can-can dancers, while the 'megaphones' have their twentieth-century counterpart in the shrieking amplifiers belting out polyglot songs to which the performers mime with lip movements not necessarily in synch. Baudelaire might have been transported by it, but his whimsical fancy is not one I can enthusiastically share.
My confreres, who are evidently men of almost boundless sophistication, seem to be able to take these shows in their stride with the ease of case-hardened psychiatrists. Me, as an odd-ball cleaving to the innocent conviction that girls have incontestable advantages over men in the matter of playing girls, I worry about where the audiences are coming from for these androgynous gaieties. The lives with gaps to be filled by other people's dressing-up fetishes may well be full of gaps, and it is worrying to believe there are enough of them to keep these performers in gainful employment.
I was still fretfully pondering the question when I got to the Aldwych, only to be instantly assailed by concern for the Royal Shakespeare Company and where its audiences are to come from as it plods doggedly through the minor works of Maxim Gorky. The director, David Jones, and the translators, Jeremy Brooks and Kitty Hunter Blair, are excavating determinedly, but it seems doubtful whether there are anY riches to be unearthed. Summerfolk was a great trial to the patience, and The Zykovs is a commonplace family chronicle with little to commend it as social comment and rather less as drama. The turgid plot has to do with a randy old timber merchant who robustly seizes for himself the girl his mewlingly disagreeable son is about to wed, and with the old fellow's spinster sister who turns down a couple of suitors on the grounds that their ardour is not matched by their integrity. Apart from the aforementioned Miss Farrow, who has elected in her performance to equate innocence with vacuity, the cast includes Paul Rogers as the merchant, Sheila Allen as his sister, and Gary Bond and Norman Rodway as her suitors. They are valiant and often impressive in their efforts to inject some blood into these cardboard cut-outs, but it is depressing that the RSC should be deploying their gifts so absurdly.
Downriver, at Greenwich, Miss Hampshire wrestles prettily with the role of Miss Julie, whom Strindberg describes as 'the half-woman, the man-hater' and who Is plainly a woman whose nature and behaviour are disastrously at odds with the actress's temperament. She quite dampens the potential combustibility of the sexuallY arrogant valet (Martin Shaw) and the play, without that explosion of passion at its centre, dwindles into unpersuasive melodramatics.
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