'Becket' as Drama of Growing Youth
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
ON STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley 'Becket' as Drama Of Growing Youth Becket. By Jean Anouilh. Translated by Lucienne Hill. Directed by Peter Glenville. Presented by David Merrick. At the St. James...
...Throughout King Henry is an overgrown (morally a never-grown) adolescent...
...the mature man recognizes many shades of gray...
...Laurence Olivier has sufficient self-confidence to allow Anthony Quinn the role of Henry, who is alone onstage at the beginning and end of the play...
...Becket is a deft drama, lightly lighting a ripening soul...
...for indeed the problem of our own age is that of growing mature...
...Olivier's performance justifies his confidence...
...As the play opens, we see Becket frolicking with the King, His Majesty's guide and boon companion in revelry...
...Hence youth may be hell-bent for a good time, or heaven-turned to save the erring world...
...Under the lash, he notes that the Norman bishops barely touch him, whereas the Saxons lay on with all their might...
...Henry opposes the power of the clergy, but is beaten back and forced to undergo the forms of penitence—even though hypocritically...
...An adolescent may be a beatnik or a revolutionary and sometimes both...
...THE PERFORMANCE of Becket impressed me, surprisingly, as an evening of youth...
...Even while doing penance for the death of Becket he is playing a game...
...He has a moment's wonder why all Saxons are called dogs, but he continues to treat them worse than his hawks and hounds...
...It is in an anguished scene when the two meet—still loving one another, but aiming at opposite goals—when Becket refuses to run from the King's assassins or to close the church doors, that Becket achieves maturity...
...it wells with youth...
...After the King and the Archbishop begin to move on separate paths, however, the problem of England's growth takes firmer shape...
...Becket, who has given himself wholeheartedly to worldly pleasures, shrinks away when the King would appoint him Archbishop of Canterbury...
...Such juxtaposition gives its power to the play, a power which necessarily fades when the two protagonists are apart...
...He never understands his wife, nor has a moment's kindness for her or for the moronic brats—so he deems them—which she has given him...
...The King, thinking he is putting the highest church post into the hands of a friend, insists on appointing Becket...
...But the strange attraction between him and Becket still exerts its power...
...The adolescent sees all things as black or white...
...The murdered Archbishop, true to his "esthetic" sense of values, has finally conquered...
...Anouilh and the company fill it with adolescent fire—without destroying the symbol in the flame...
...The King was wrong...
...The production itself combines a youthful playfulness with riper overtones...
...but when Henry and Becket, thus mounted, face one another, the horses are forgotten in the drama's flash...
...But dimly, through the eyes of the defeated Henry II, we can see in the distance the successful Henry VIII...
...Hatred surges in the King when he discovers his mistake...
...England, he says, "is well worth the masquerade...
...James Theatre...
...It was refreshing to find so much of the spirit of youth playing over the 800-year-old story of Henry II and Thomas a Becket...
...Becket shows us one battle in the long and arduous war for the separation of church and state...
...Similarly, the amusing caricature of the Pope and the Cardinal in Rome, suspicious of one another as they calculate what to do with the exiled Archbishop, dissolves into the moving scene of Becket on his knees before his God...
...put them together in a locked room, and what would come out of it...
...We see that while the Norman King has more power, his Saxon playfellow has better taste...
...Picture a bond between, say, Billy Graham and Fidel Castro...
...And, in the writing and the production, the problems of growth and of integrity come through...
...In Becket, the adolescent fling is supplanted by the adolescent fervor...
...It is assured, smilingly happy-go-haywire adolescent at the beginning, and at the end suggesting that some humans are capable of growing mature...
...In a moment of discernment Henry says to Becket: "Your morality is esthetics...
...When the nobles come in on horseback, the actors' hidden feet suggesting the jog of the dummy horses they ride, there is a quick smile...
...Integrity and the church in this age were one...
...In Murder in the Cathedral T. S. Eliot converted the killing of the Archbishop into a morality for our time...
...This treatment of the olden figures as growing boys brings them somehow nearer to the reality of our times than presenting them as stately personages out of history's book...
...he knows he would then give himself wholeheartedly to God...
...The tension lapses somewhat in the second half of the play, because Henry and Becket have taken different paths, and the sparks come mainly from their being together...
...So Socrates was mature, refusing Spartan sanctuary, to take the Athenian hemlock...
Vol. 44 • October 1960 • No. 41
