The Stage
Weales, Gerald
sacred community accountable only to ourselves. Unlike their forebears, they are fundamentally one-worlders. Several of the architects of the nuclear bomb had, as is generally known, strong...
...Then Metternichean reaction was busy turning back the cultural clock...
...COME HOME TO MAYA 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE STAGE The day after I came back from the Kennedy Center and a look at Arthur Miller's first new play in five years, The Archbishop's Ceiling, the New York Times carried a story about Pavel Kohout's loss of his home in Prague, the most recent move by the government in its attempt to isolate the playwright from the intellectual and theatrical world outside Czechoslovakia...
...Sigmund, Miller's protagonist, is a celebrated novelist, published abroad, banned at home, who has written a public letter to the United Nations which has so ineensed the government that he must finally choose between exile and a trial for treason...
...With a cast of thousands--and those are just the stars...
...The characters are complex in conception, richly endowed with biography, dangerously articulate, but they are trapped in the play as well as in the imaginary country...
...But the peace revolution of the Sixties is dormant, not dead...
...What a Lovely War, and, second, he has chosen to make this film about one of the greatest military fiascoes ever...
...his is the deepest commitment to Maya, but significantly the book is not yet finished...
...Well, maybe not the whole war, but at least that campaign to take the Arnhem bridge with which the movie deals...
...Adrian, an American novelist, ill-at-ease with his own success, who turns to this beleaguered country in search of something--perhaps, as Maya says, limitations to his freedom...
...So far I have been discussing The /ng in the conventional terms one playwright of ideas whose characters tative figures...
...The equivocal nature of the Archbishop's ceiling (Adrian likens the possible hidden microphone to a watchful God whose existence is in Commonweal: 431 doubt) is the play's metaphor for an atmosphere in which no one is sure of anyone else (did Marcus set up Sigmund for arrest...
...Attenborough's film is about as long, as expensive and as pointless as World War II itself was...
...Restoration" reigned...
...Marcus's novel is apparently stylishly facile and has just become a tremendous success, in and out of the country...
...Political leaders tiptoe around ground once prepared for new frontiers and great societies...
...Though only passively now, they are shaping into coming reality the substance of the pacifist cliche: Someday a war will be declared and ~nobody will come...
...This is to be gathered from the fact that, first, Attenborough has already made his anti-war sentiments clear in an earlier film, Oh...
...It is, as usual with Miller, a play heavy with ideas, one that seduces the viewer into the kind of discussion that these paragraphs contain...
...Miller's play, which is set in an unnamed European capital in which the line between literary and political acts ]has disappeared, is timely, then, but unhappily it would have been timely almost any week since the end of World War II...
...My neat explication of the character may not hold since, after all, maya means the power to create illusions, a definition with political and literary implications within the play but one that might also put critics on their guard...
...However distressing it may prove to flag-waving patriots, the war system is fini.~hed...
...With Maya, however, Archbishop's Ceil...
...Adrian, as outsider (only he of the three men has not had an affair with Maya, and even Martin was once her husband), has written a novel so false that he has destroyed the manuscript...
...in this situation, he can only look on with fascination and longing...
...The hidden peace revolution is countering this drift, though surface conditions belie it...
...The Bourbons returned, autocracy revived, revolutionaries either quietly licked their wounds or escaped into romantic dream worlds...
...But the rhythm of revolution is at work...
...The four main characters in The Archbishop's Ceiling do not act out of political necessity alone...
...She seems not simply a character but a symbol--not for the author as much as for the three novelists in the play, each of whom has written a book about her...
...Tomorrow's world is the world of the children of the new modes of thought...
...uses for Miller, a edge in~ represenMiller may be on new ground...
...if you count the extras in, the total must get up near a million--Attenborough's film recreates in relentless detail one of the most ambitious and disastrous Allied campaigns, the attempt to take by paratrooper assault the bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem, Holland...
...Sigmund's novel is apparently his finest work, one that takes him beyond the satire by which he made his name, a doublevoiced fiction in which the heroine is at once symbolic and touchingly human...
...Some of Miller's most recent plays---Alter the Fall, The Price---end in muted affirmation, but not since The Crucible in 1953, in which John Proctor elects death over false confession , has the playwright written so romantic a curtain for a play seriously concerned with moral choices...
...The author of The Archbishop's Ceiling is the internationally celebrated Arthur Miller, "the voice of conscience" to borrow the title of Harold Clurman's article in the program, but I will settle for the playwright of earlier days...
...or even of his own actions (does Adrian, in coming to the country, inadvertently do what the government wants...
...Just for a moment, John Cullum (as Sigmund) becomes a wicked little boy, preening himself on the praise his book has received from the men who confiseated it, and with that gesture, the actor reminds us that none of these characters has the dimensionality of Joe Keller, Willy Loman, Gregory Solomon...
...Sigmund's decision is reached during a long, second act in which the crosstalk of mixed motivation obscures the neat sacrificial line that John Proctor walks so surely...
...Come home, Arthur Miller, and rediscover the American Maya...
...On the human level, it is less successful...
...Given the context, even the grand gesture of Sigmund and the others may be the result of manipulation, a possibility that the play's last line, Marcus's remark about "a game," seems to confirm...
...Several of the architects of the nuclear bomb had, as is generally known, strong second thoughts...
...That day, fourth fronters insist, is closer than our so-called hard-nosed realists can ever know...
...It's not so much the camera range that demonstrates this truism in these two film.~ as the historical perspective from which they are made...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN The summer season has opened with a couple of war movies that give new significance to that old filmmaker's saw about comedy being done in long shots and tragedy in close-up...
...The idealism of youth has been weakened first by the macing and clubbing of the Nixon law-and-order regime, and then by the moral weariness that follows every season of well-doing...
...The wave of the past laps around us...
...The war here is an inter-gallactic one occurring in approximately the same millennium when Tom Corbett became a space cadet...
...The action takes place in Marcus's apartment in a building which was once the Archbishop's palace...
...We are today roughly where western Europe was in the years after Waterloo...
...The Empire has launched a satellite, Death Star, with the capacity to destroy entire planets, and only a few errant members of the Rebellion can save the universe from this ultimate weapon...
...they are moved in various degrees by artistic vanity, by professional jealousy, by sexual desire or resentment, by fl'iendship or the longing for it...
...GERALD V~/EALES WA]R IN SW~.I.I...
...But in the following decades, after a series of revolutionary flare-ups, new repressions--"seasons of dismay'--and renewed flareups, the revolution finally overpowered where it did not completely destroy the monarchical principle that was the main target of the French revolutionists and that had for centuries set the tone and general conditions of life for western European society...
...For Miller, presumably, the romantic choice is the only practical one, although the case in the new play is not as black-and-white as that in The Crucible...
...It would be tempting to see her as freedom entrapped or something like that, but I assume that she embodies homeland in its most complex sense, a loved and dangerous place whose presence---if only for the familiarity of language--is essential to the creative artist...
...On the sidelines (literally, since most of his scenes are played standing at the edge of the stage talking on the telephone) is Martin, a critic who is also errand boy for the forces who would destroy an artist he admires...
...Marcus, an older novelist, who spent five years in prison in Stalinist days but has since made an uncomfortable accommodation with authority and who is jealous of Sigmund as artist and lover...
...With the figure of Martin confronting us from the stage, we have to be sure whom we are serving...
...Implicated in his dilemma and his choice are three friends or former friends: Maya, an actress blacklisted in films because of a speech she once made at the Cannes Film Festival, who loves and is loved by Sigmund although their affair has come to an end to protect the novelist's wife...
...The tragedy is Richard Attenborough's A Bridge Too Far, which is a reprise of World War II...
...One of them, Albert Einstein, said, "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe...
...as a prize safe author, he has developed a superficial relationship with the country for which he once suffered and his need for Maya--which he expresses in sexual terms--provides his strongest motivation...
...the characters often talk directly to the light fixture--going on record, so to speak--instead of to one another...
...Today, as in post-Napoleonic times, a season of dismay is upon us...
...The idea behind A Bridge Too Far 8 July 1977:432...
...At the end of the play, Sigmund forces Marcus to voice his support of the UN letter in a room that is probably bugged and, having decided to stay, Sigmund, then Maya and Adrian, each carrying part of Sigmund's new novel, go out to face probable arrest, certain danger...
...The assumption is that there is a microphone hidden in the ornate chandelier...
...Miller, I assume, intends The Archbishop's Ceiling as the dramatic equivalent of Sigmund's novel, as a work with both ideational and human validity...
...With the same certainty that one can presume the purpose of the Arnhem campaign was to cross the Rhine and end the war, the purpose of the movie is to say an unkind word about wars in general...
...Reactionary "conservatism" is in the air...
...The other film, the comedy, is George Lucas's Star Wars, which contains only one star, Alec Guinness, and he's in a rather minor role at that...
...The conflicting motivations are further confused by the uncertainty implicit in th e play's title...
...The suggestion is that the final horror of the situation is not that freedom is openly destroyed, but that it is so hedged by uncertainty that straightforward action becomes impossible and one's identity is called into doubt...
Vol. 104 • July 1977 • No. 14
