THE SCREEN:
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
THE STAGE Unless one goes to England as a theatrical explorer, in search of life in the regional and fringe theaters, the play-going impulse is to see as much as possible of what is going on at...
...Terence Rattigan's Cause Celebre is a tedious courtroom drama and Mary O'Malley's Once a Catholic is a comedy about adolescents hemmed in by Catholic education, c. 1950s, which leaves no cliche unturned...
...If the play has more substance, as The Country Wife certainly does, it can become a victim of playfulness...
...Demonstration was more to be expected from the RSC's The Days of the Commune, in which each scene, whether involving good workers or bad capitalists, contributes to Brecht's argument about the destruction of a true people's revolution...
...On the basis of these two productions, one might assume that England's classic companies are at their best when they are frivolous...
...Still, I saw enough of the work of both companies to come up with a few generalizations...
...The only revival that I saw outside the institutional theatres was Clifford Williams's Rosmersholm, which was wrecked by Daniel Massey's excessively stagey Rosmer...
...If I had the space to work in, I could point to weaknesses of one kind or another in many of the productions I saw, but except for the Rattigan and O'Malley plays, fiascoes both, all of them provided theatrical sustenance enough to make me glad I had a chance to see them...
...The traps that O'Malley finds in a specific setting, Heathcote Williams sees everywhere...
...Stated less austerely—and my own delight in the productions softens any artistic puritanism I may still carry about—the two shows reflect the concern of English performers and directors with technique, theatrical ingenuity and caricature, with surface over substance...
...Williams, who directed Wild Oats, must have known that what worked for O'Keefe would not work for Ibsen and should have stayed around long enough to hold Massey in check...
...Claire Bloom's Rebecca West lacked the neurotic quality which for me explains the final suicide, but her sense of a strong Rebecca, triumphant in death if not in life, deserves a production solid enough to put it to the test...
...On the non-comic front, the emphasis on the theatricality of the immediate scenes, on character as unsustained gesture, makes the best kind of sense of Henry VI, Part Three, the only one of the trilogy that I saw at Stratford, and even manages an accumulated effect, beyond plot and character, as though Shakespeare were giving a demonstration of human corruption in all its manifestations...
...I have long believed that Granville Barker is one of the best playwrights in die modern English theater, but his demanding use of language, his willingness to forgo conventional explanation has, until recently, kept him out of the regular English repertory...
...its chief, perhaps its only virtue is to provide an occasion for a deceptively casual performance by Alec Guinness...
...The difficulty with the kind of short, intense bout of theater-going with which I have just indulged myself is that one is at the mercy of the repertory system, hedged in by what is immediately available...
...although William Gaskill occasionally lets the caricature get out of hand, he never loses the essential Barker ideas to their entertaining setting...
...From conception through education, the child is a victim of the system which produces and deforms him, Williams's Playpen insists...
...The National's production of The Madras House proves that Barker, like Shaw, is a serious dramatist with a clear sense of comic surface...
...GERALD WEALES...
...The plays lacks the arcane force of AC/DC, but as performed by the four actors who make up the Theatre Machine, it is an often funny, theatrically effective evening, predictable in its ideational stance if not in its inventive detail...
...I saw the National's new production in preview and while Albert Finney, who plays Homer, was fighting a crippling cold, even in this ragged form it was clear that the director had recognized Wycherley's artificiality without ever touching the ugly reality that underlies it, and that he was pointing up Wycherley's bawdy with naughty indicators more appropriate to No Sex Please—We're British...
...As for Shaw himself—too often reduced by mannered productions to a writer of comic turns—he is well served by the RSCs Man and Superman although Richard Pasco's John Tanner, admirable in his ideational exposition, lacks that touch of self-hypnosis which explains how so intelligent a man can so misunderstand Ann's intentions...
...If the play is cleverly insubstantial, as John O'Keefe's eighteenth-century comedy Wild Oats is, it can become a perfect vehicle for talented performers, as it does in the RSC production now settled into a regular West End run...
...fragile goods compared to Ashes or Cries from Casement, it is still obviously a Rudkin play in its tendency to introduce complexity into a situation which seems to call for agitprop simple-mindedness...
...the latter, a Feydeau farce, newly translated by John Mortimer and played with a solemn absurdity in which precision wins out over pandemonium...
...The new plays I saw were conventional in their various ways...
...There are virtues to this kind of theater, too...
...The two productions that are most obviously successful, sustained in tone and intention, are the RSC's The Comedy of Errors and the National's The Lady from Maxim's...
...THE STAGE Unless one goes to England as a theatrical explorer, in search of life in the regional and fringe theaters, the play-going impulse is to see as much as possible of what is going on at the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company...
...a lunchtime offering at Ed Berman's Almost Free Theatre, begins as a parody of the sleepwalking scene in Macbeth and uses a distressed Queen Elizabeth to clock the repressive sins of contemporary England...
...The former is an outrageously inventive modern-dress musical version of Shakespeare's comedy...
...Alan Bennett's The Old Country is the portrait of a Burgess/Maclean/Philby figures, full of self-loathing, for whom isolation is a fact of life and irony both sword and shield...
...David Rudkin's short Sovereignty...
...There are obvious dangers in this approach to theater...
...The variety and the general quality of the work, not to say its sheer bulk, dwarfs the ordinary West End fare which consists largely of farces, musicals, revivals and regional transplants...
Vol. 105 • February 1978 • No. 3
