The Stage

...The production begins somewhat tentatively, the scenes less vivid than they sound on the page, but as the play progresses, the Anne (Roberta Maxwell) and the Colin (Brian Murray) develop such substance that the soliloquies belong to them, not, as I feared, to the playwright...

...Colin explains that when he tried to tell Cousin Sammy that "we have to try to find some new way," Sammy, who is willing to fight until "Ulster is in ashes," made an up-yours sign and said, "Phoenix yerself...

...Understanding the necessity to put no-longer-possible selves behind them, they must now face the fact that they will not be parents...

...Reading the play, I had some doubt about the long soliloquies which carry the play thematically beyond the personal story...

...The danger at this point is that the comedy could be replaced by sentimentality, but Rudkin avoids that trap too-- largely by means of the technical devices he uses...

...It took fifteen years for A/ore Night Come to make it to the United States, a production at Long Wharf in New Haven in 1975...

...they are often aggressively antirealistic as the characters play all the people in an encounter or speak directly to the audience...

...Charles Wood, David Pinner), but Rudkin was still so uneasy a presence on the English theatrical scene that he could write in Contemporary Dramatists (1973), "Ten years in the writing business, and I still find no outlet for what gifts I have...

...his face which appears powdered and painted like a very refined old suburban harlots, and his ridiculous tittle voice"-he is wholly dissolved in acid...

...Rudkin is not after such easy game...

...Outside her window a bled" England desperately celebrates: the guns of peace boom, sirens whistle, "people seem to be whistling and giving catcalls and stirring up the dogs to bark . . . oh dear, now drunken soldiers are beginning to cheer...

...Much of the early part of the play shows Anne and Colin Harding following the often conflicting advice of a doctor, a semenologist and a gynecological surgeon...

...but "O God...

...The observations are perfect: exact, lethal...

...Since the play is about losses, the closing in of possibilities, making do in an imperfect world, Anne and Colin finally conceive only to lose the child and, in the process, all possibility of further conception...

...from jokes into small horrors...

...Colin goes back to a funeral in Northern Ireland, finds his country moving toward a destruction that appalls him and discovers that he is no Ulsterman in their eyes, cut off fro~-n a line of inheritance just when he cannot start a line of his own...

...As I watched the play on stage, the doubts disappeared...

...There are ashes and ashes...

...When Virginia Woolf's eyes rested too long upon anything, the focus tended to narrow until it assumed the shape and tensile strength of a stiletto whereupon its object, pierced through, quivered once and died most horribly...

...Adoption seems their only hope for a child and introduces them to a new batch of "understanding" professionals...

...Although his view of nature's medical helpers is not particularly sanguine, he intends them to be characters not caricatures...

...Finally, it is the determination of Anne and Colin which stills the comedy in the situation...

...The play ends as Anne lifts Colin's head and looks into his face...

...The occasion was the opening of Ashes at the Public Theatre in a production that had already played at the Manhattan Theatre Club...

...Before the audience and the characters learn the results of the application for adoption, the play opens out, the personal begins to be social...

...all--everything: the people, the house itself, its furnishings and decorative objects, paintings---that entire litCommonweal: 371 fie universe falls dead beneath her pen...

...ASHES AND AFTER 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE STAGE "An Arresting New Voice from Britain...

...The scenes are brief although they get longer as they play goes on--usually ending in blackout...

...A superb, cruel performance, at once murderous and channing, which proves a mere preparation, now that she has wanned to the task, for bloodier mayhem to come, "gossip" about her beloved friend Ka Cox and her new husband, a painter-of-sorts...

...Their deep desire for parenthood stifles the satiric impulse, or at least shunts it to the edge of a play which deals feelingly with two people being dehumanized in the search for a fuller humanity...

...You remember the kind of politeness, and the little jokes, and all the deference, and opening doors for one, and looking as ff the mention of the w.c...

...Their small pomposities, their clumsy kindnesses, the inevitable distance between their income-producing professions and the pain of the Hardings turn well-meaning lines like "Well then, why aren't we conceiving...

...The comic negation in the gesture cannot erase the fact that a phoenix has been introduced into these ashes...

...Nowmwith the successful revival of A/ore Night Come at the Royal Shakespeare in 1974 and the reception of Ashes in this countrymhe stands a chance of escaping the dream he reported in Contemporary Dramatists in which, at the end of a party in his honor, he found him~lf clearing up the dirty dishes...

...The phrase was headline on Mel Gussow's very good interview with David Rudkin in the January 23 New York Times...

...All these keep the tears from rising and yet allow the couple to develop as completely realized characters...

...Anne, newly aware of the natural ruin around her, of fellow Englishmen (human beings) who want to get theirs now and let the future go hang, recounts a devastating dream which ends with the ambiguous "Take oH your dead...

...How am I to finish my last chapter with all this shindy . . . . " Not that she was entirely without a certain degree of relief that the end had at last arrived (her set, the Bloomsbury group and its extensions, were in the main opposed to the war: many of them were C.O.s, and Bertrand Russell was not alone in having gone to jail for opposing the war...

...It is not unusual for an English playwright to be unknown in this country (v...

...Two days later, again writing to Vanessa, again deploring the loud, festive messiness of Armistice (now even more nastily: "The London poor, half drunk and very sentimental or completely stolid with their hideous voices and clothes and bad teeth, make one doubt whether any decent life will ever be possible, or whether it matters if...

...Rudkin can be a difficult playwright, as his fascinating radio play Cries trom Casement as His Bones Are Brought to Dublin (1973) indicates, and he is never a congenial one as, say, Tom Stoppard and Simon Gray are, because-his subject matter tends to be abrasive...

...Ashes is moving and intelligent, a theatrical evocation of the public world through the private suffering and courage of a single couple...

...Much of the humor comes directly from Colin and Anne, self-defensive gestures that help protect them from the processes which reduce them to laboratory specimens, machines, animals...

...All the characters other than Anne and Colin are played by one actor and one actress...

...what a noise they make" is the prevailing sentiment...

...As Rudkin told Gussow, "An awful lot of my work is about love...

...Colin and Anne were once a playwright and an actress who, sensing their own limitations, turned to teaching...

...GERALD WEALES V mOINIA WOOLF is writing her sister Vanessa Bell, the recipient of roughly one-third of the 600 letters which Volume Two of the projected six volumes of her immense correspondence comprises.* The date is November 11, 1918, the end of the most ravaging war in history (until the next one...

...the next year saw the American premiere of Ashes at the Mark Taper in Los Angeles...

...Whatever is...

...there are musical jokes, set lyric speeches, philosophic ruminations...

...Ka, she remarks with almost audible pleasure, got "nervous when my eyes rested too long upon him...

...Ashes recounts the attempts of a childless couple to become parents...

...There is a touch of overstatement in the lament since Rudkin has had more than a dozen productions on stage or in television since he began writing, although only a few of his plays have been published...

...I enjoyed it immensely . . . . " The report is devastating...

...Both the chronicle of failure and the social-political extension ot~ the infertility 10 June 1977:370 of the Hardings suggest the world as wasteland...

...although Rudkin says in the published script that there is no "thematic significance" to this doubling, surely all the figures function as outsiders to the small core of pain and love that the Hardings represent...

...Their fiat is dismissed with odiurn~ "acid lemon colors against black currains, and one white rose against a wall the color of skim milk"--and he, of whom "one instinctively says: 'What a Whippersnapper!' " with his "little mongrel cur's body...

...A moment later, war and peace behind her, she gives Vanessa the truly important news of the day---"gossip" of the sublimest kind, an account of a *The Letters o] Virginia Wool], Volume Two 1912-1922, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, $14.95) "tea" with friends of the older generation, "all dressed up so irreproachably so nice, kind, respectable--so insufferable...

...The irony was that the "new voice" had been trying to make itself in the theater since 1960, when A/ore Night Come was produced at Oxford where the 24-year-old Rudkin was working on an M.A...

...Since many of the lines at this point are funny, it would be a simple matter to convert Ashes into an acid satire on the methods and results of scientific sexologists...

...As we come to the end of the play, we and they learn that they have been turned down by the adoption officials, that "Laughter of children in our house, not for us...

...Dignity," snaps Anne as she assumes the dog's position that the semenologist thinks may aid conception...

...even would convey nothing whatever to them...

...What a bother~ After all, she was that very day trying to complete her second novel, Night and Day...

...Not so positive an image as the classical phoenix, the shared final moment suggests that there are living coals in these ashes...