England's New Anti-Establishmentarians
LOTTMAN, RUTH LANGDON INGLIS, HERBERT
ON STAGE England's New Anti-Establishmentarians By Ruth Langdon Inglis London After 10 years of "I'm All Right, Jack" apathy, the British theater-goer has finally been pricked into a...
...And recently, for the first time, a novel was put on trial for political opinions expressed in fictional form...
...one must go elsewhere for a complete news report...
...A worried British voter wonders what will happen if the Americans suddenly make a "boo-boo" and drop the bomb...
...Beyond the Fringe, now in its 11th month, is still playing to packed houses here and is scheduled for Broadway production this fall...
...He is Hope...
...Their humor is not sick...
...there's always that bit in the corner that you can't quite get out," says one, taking his sermon from the text: "My Brother Esau is a Hairy Man but I Am a Smooth Man"), Macmillan, the Beaverbrook press...
...rather, it reflects a sharply articulated outrage...
...Books and magazines are banned with regularity...
...At the opening of the revue, performed by four Cambridge graduates on a bare stage, the audience is lifted to its corporate feet with a reverent, if scratchy, rendition of '"God Save the Queen" (in straight-faced English theater, this traditional homage occurs with every performance...
...Ruth Langdon Inglis often writes on the British cultural scene for the Spectator and other magazines...
...Shakespeare's crude piling up of corpses at the ends of tragedies, and his even less deft head-patting of the humor of the "little people," the earthy yeomen of old England, both receive a welcome cuffing...
...Because he has sent out a questionnaire to his tradeunion members and 95 per cent of the respondents state that they are against having their wives and children blown up...
...Most of the company's poisoned darts are aimed at the sacred English cows who appear to ruminate placidly in the shadow of the mushroom cloud—driveling Anglican parsons ("Life is like a tin of sardines...
...Though gadflying the Establishment is the most obvious surface aim of the Fringers, one is made aware of an underlying desperation at being a nation of sitting ducks in a potential nuclear holocaust...
...Instead of drawing blood, it is drawing bright, gay, young Chelsea things, the progeny of the Establishment, all eager to giggle at themselves and ready for fun and Fringe humor (Peter Cook, of the Fringe quartet, is a co-proprietor...
...he has rewritten him, retaining the ribaldry and the scatology but changing allusions from the Peloponessian War to the Algerian war and the military plotting in France of the terrorist OAS...
...The patient also...
...In a Fringe sketch entitled "Black Equals White" by Peter Cook, the moral is that colored people can be equally as unpleasant as white...
...Its foster child, a supper club called "The Establishment," is having teething troubles, however...
...everybody smiles...
...The doctor reigns...
...But the real target is de Gaulle and nothing is spared, not even his sex life...
...But the Fringers also reach back to take a slap at past glories, presently established...
...If France is now a police state, on s'amuse bien...
...Parody in other forms and places has been prosecuted, but at the Theatre de Dix Heures, since 1925 a Pigalle landmark, the current show is called Charles XI—an indication of how the group feels about the regime...
...Which courts...
...In an earlier scene Trygaeus warns that he will have Zeus prosecuted before the courts...
...Tiscot's records are of course banned from the Government airwaves...
...Half-way through the wobbly salute to royalty, the pianist breaks into swinging jazz, leaving the audience to blush at its own Pavlovian reaction, knowing that it's been had, but ready for more...
...Burdened as the club owners are by patronage, they have nevertheless managed to create a few sharp, satirical sketches, notably one about a Foreign Secretary who greets his visitors with "welcome to my Hume...
...And then what will Prime Minister Macmillan answer, pursues the voter...
...True, the State radio with its several stations (including one TV channel and FM), has become an unimaginatively servile reflection of Government policy...
...Some favorite, contemporary liberal conceits get a jabbing, too...
...Peter Cook brings a Banda-like flavor reminiscent of his Fringe sketch when, in referring to Jomo Kenyatta, he says: "Jomo doesn't want to be the Messiah— he just wants to be Queen.' If this British imitation of San Francisco's "hungry i" has so far not been as successful as Beyond the Fringe in ruffling England's oily calm, it nevertheless represents a trend toward anti-Establishment humor...
...Vilar has not translated Aristophanes...
...He walks among beds...
...The evidence is contradictory...
...Taking off on a Hastings Banda or a Kwame Nkrumah at an in-depth, face-to-face TV interview, Cook, as the Negro leader, says: "One man, one vote, that is the law of God, especially for the nine million black idiots who vote for me...
...In Vilar's version the god Hermes tells the Athenian farmer Trygaeus, who has mounted to heaven on the back of a dung-beetle in order to solicit Zeus' help in putting an end to the war, why Athens suffers: "The initial cause of the catastrophe, oh my dear Athenians, is your habit of handing over the reins to a single man, to the family doctor, when things go wrong...
...One can only say "God Bless Them," even to the extent of swinging the blessing to the tune of "God Save the Queen...
...TNP is Government-subsidized (a small subsidy, we are informed early in the play), and the boldness of Jean Vilar's Peace is remarkable...
...They can't," answers a suave Conservative politician, "We have an agreement that they must ring 10 Downing Street first for our okay...
...The names of some of the revue numbers also reflect nuclear outrage: "The Heat-Death of the Universe," "Aftermyth of War" and "The End of the World...
...Jonathan Miller, who looks like a kosher Fernandel with red hair, tells a liberal gathering: "Actually I'm not really a Jew, I'm Jew-ish I don't go the whole hog...
...Tell me that I'm fine.' 'You are fine.' 'Tell me I'm healthy.' 'You are healthy, you are strong, oh Athenians.' The doctor dies...
...The chansonniers criticize de Gaulle from the viewpoint of the bourgeois Right, and the show's xenophobia, lament at the disappearance of France's empire and gratuitous anti-Semitism are typical of Right-wing satire...
...A dogmatic labor leader, fashioned after trade-union unilateralist Frank Cousins, says he knows the English people support his stand on abolishing the bomb on home ground...
...Oh, he may say yeeeeessss or he may say nnnnnooooo as the whim takes him.' With all this nuclear humor, or unhumor, it is not surprising to hear Jonathan Miller, one of the leading creative spirits behind the Fringe quartet (the others are Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore), describe his revue in nuclear terms as "one of the genetic changes that has come from the fallout of Osborne's explosion a research station in which we might develop the weapons necessary for the final overthrow of the Neo-Gothic stronghold of Victorian good taste...
...The first blow to the comfortable underbelly of the Establishment—that shadowy, powerful aggregation of Royal Family, Anglican Church, Old School Tie and Tory government so blindly served in the Victorian era and no less revered, despite its anachronistic quality, in this nuclear age—has come with the revue, Beyond the Fringe...
...At the Dix Heures, performer after performer attacks the unpopular Premier, Michel Debr...
...Herbert Lottman regularly follows the lively arts in France...
...when I bought one on the Champs-Elysées not long ago, the police had just forbidden playing the record on the shop's sidewalk loud-speaker...
...No, he's a high-ranking officer, he'd only be acquitted...
...ON STAGE England's New Anti-Establishmentarians By Ruth Langdon Inglis London After 10 years of "I'm All Right, Jack" apathy, the British theater-goer has finally been pricked into a degree of humorous self-analysis by a group of young men who might be called the AntiEstablishmentarians...
...In an immense auditorium usually devoted to Moliere, Brecht and half-forgotten classics, the TNP's director, Jean Vilar, this season unveiled a new version of Aristophanes' Peace, a short, bawdy satire first performed in 421 B. C. to protest the war between Athens and Sparta (which had then been going on for a decade...
...Similarly, and far more surprising, criticism from the Left comes out of France's best repertory company, the Theatre National Populaire (TNP...
...France's Anti-Gaullists By Herbert Lottman Paris Is the Fifth Republic a constitutional monarchy, a benevolent dictatorship or a democracy in the French tradition...
...The military...
...Yet if President de Gaulle's regime is repressive, what are we to make of the chansonniers, those traditional Montmartre performers who draw faithful audiences for their cruel and unconditional satire of the Government...
...Miller and his co-partners are trying to resuscitate the English genius for satire—suffocated, in Miller's opinion, by that '"growth of 19th Century good manners and rise of philistine values of the Industrial élite...
...When one of company points out, for example, that the English population has four minutes fleeing time in the event of a nuclear war, another retorts with unctuous patriotic pride that, after all, wasn't it an Englishman who ran a mile in less...
...One act brings down the house: Henri Tiscot's imitation of a de Gaulle press conference (the General's answer to the pigeons of Paris and the damage they inflict on the statues is oiseaudetermination and "regrouping" of the statues...
...And how does he know, asks an interviewer...
Vol. 45 • April 1962 • No. 7
