Gallic symbols
"Kenneth Hurren _ I somehow knew before I got into the auditorium proper that Le Grand Magic Circus, a peripatetic French company which is at the Round House for a season, was not going to ingratiate itself with me sensationally. It was a strangely prescient feeling not entirely unconnected with having my face daubed rather tenderly with glitter dust by a transvestite in the foyer, the while a similarly ambiguous confederate fluttered a small handful of spangles into what remains of my hair. I felt they did little for me. "By God," said a tall, stiff-backed codger of military mien, striding to the exit, "this is no place for a decent man." Some of us, survivors of many a perilous night on the theatrical fringe, are made of sterner stuff — though I Shall not deny that my eyes followed him wistfully as I turned instead, resignedly, to the duty of the night.
When I got to my seat, a voluptuous but shy fellow in drag offered to sell me a bunch of flowers, but I pretended to absorb myself in the programme which was not, as it happened, percepti bly more encouraging. The company, I learned, had begun opera tions in 1965 with performances at the Bourges Psychiatric Hospital (this intellig_ence came to seem less cryptic as the evening progressed) and had gone on to such exploits as "street theatre research in London, experiments in the street and on the Underground" in 1968 (experiments I mercifully missed), an appearance at the "Festival of Guerrilla Theatre in Toronto" in 1970, and a rich, full life of homologous ac tivities all over the world. The programme resume did not men tion whether they had ever been back to the psychiatric hospital; or, indeed, how they got out.
As you may guess, this elaborate discursiveness is a device to veil my charitable reluctance to discuss the actual show at the Round House which, to put it as gently as possible, is not one I can fervently recommend to the cautious inyestor. It is
called From Moses to Mao-5,000 Years of Love and Adventure, and is described by its author, JerOme
Savary, as "a child's view of man's history" — a tag which, in itself, is propably guaranteed to give you nightmares, or to put you in mind of Anthony Newley, which may be roughly the same thing. Savary, who is also the founder, mentor, director and leading player of the Circus, picks his events arbitrarily and rearranges them anarchically, presumably on the grounds that the 'child' whose view he is taking' would be unlikely to emerge from the schoolroom with any idea of whether Joan of Arc came before Queen Victoria, Einstein before Buddha, or Marx before Moliere. A half-wit in this respect, the Child is monstrously precocious in others (a brass bedstead pitched in the aisle sees a fair amount of copulative and obstetrical activity) and is vulgarly whimsical enough to see Christ with a football rattle on Calvary. Savary uses historical personalities mostly as cartoon sym bols, but where he aspires to the childlike, I fear he achieves only the childish. It is possible, of course that the show has a large satirical and philosophical purpose that eluded me, for I failed even to grasp why it was supposed to be taking place "on the edge of the Nevada desert" — except that that would certainly be a very good place for it.
To end more cheerfully, a reminder that Jonathan Miller's production of The Seagull, seen and commended at Chichester last summer ( The Spectator, June 2), is now at the Greenwich Theatre. I continue to wish that Robert Stephens's Trigorin would look a little less guilty and a little more genuinely forgetful of the seagull when the wretched bird is brought in, stuffed, in the last act; but this is a minor complaint with a production which, beautifully cast and played, is as impressive as any in London.
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