Racine Uprooted, Arden Transplanted
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Racine Uprooted, Arden Transplanted It was a mistake for The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Theater Arts (IASTA) to invite Paul-Emile Deiber to...
...they are not satisfactory substitutes for good dialogue...
...He doesn't take refuge behind claims of accuracy and objectivity...
...But Racine's tragedy in rhymed couplets can sound only, at best, like disused Wordsworth or Swinburne...
...He knows how to exploit the prisoners' helplessness by leading them back cunningly from one dead end after another...
...My knees are trembling as I feel myself give way./Have I gone mad or have my wits begun to stray...
...As Ph??dre (pronounced "Fed" for some reason), Beatrice Straight has two blue beacons for eyes, a handsome figure decorated with a rock garden of jewelry, and -who can blame her for this?the vitality of a patient emerging from shock therapy...
...Some of the hokier dialogue may or may not be intentionally ironic-it should be -for example, the Irishman's "There was a time when my heart knew a gladness...
...he recruits for his characters an Irishman, a Chinese, a Greek, a Negro and an Anglo-Saxon, all legal murderers, all decent guys-a pat arrangement, but the playwright does keep the friendships and conflicts between them private, rather than "universal...
...If Arden seems to resolve his thesis into an injunction to avoid repeating and so multiplying horror, not to allow ends to dictate means, and if this injunction is no novelty, it still bears especial repeating in today's political context...
...But this is a work that develops by linear ritual, not organically, and Martin Fried, the director, makes each episode play for all it is worth...
...So has William Arrowsmith in portions of his renderings of Aristophanes...
...Most strikingly, John Colicos trills Musgrave's r's nicely but keeps lapsing into pure Welsh cadences...
...It was a second mistake for Deiber to request a translation that would follow the Alexandrine beat in English, retain an endstopped rhyme, and be a literal transcription of Racine's words, because Racine does not go into a literal English that has any contemporary value and the Alexandrine is a tongue-defying meter in English (most translators sensibly stay away from it) which comes across as 10 syllables and a double hiccup...
...Watching earlier IASTA productions under the direction of big names from overseas, I have often wondered whether the actors had any business pursuing "advanced studies" after, evidently, so little preparation at the primary levels...
...Musgrave's combined militarism and militant religious beliefs make him want to outdo the Old Testament and take five eyes for an eye, in order to perform what he regards as "God's dance on this earth," for "all we are is his strong legs to dance it...
...Four events alter the prisoners' routine...
...at worst, like a witless impersonation of W. S. Gilbert...
...There are only tiny rations of humor and exaggeration in the writing when certain speeches practically cry out for more...
...By contrast, Ralph S. Arzoomanian's new play is a work that goes directly to the best sources in Europe (Beckett, Genet, Pinter) for its inspiration, and imposes on them a specifically American experience and colloquialism...
...Lowell chose to translate the ideas and passions of Ph??dre, not its vocabulary...
...The translator who cares for his author declares himself...
...He agitates the town once, when the people assume he has been sent to break a miners' strike, and then again when he turns a Gatling gun on a crowd in the marketplace...
...The songs are disruptive without, as in Brecht, making telling arguments...
...And the exposition through the first two acts is protracted...
...Arzoomanian provides confessions, dreams, horseplay and banter to while away their time...
...I now proclaim you free and give you liberty Since you took food and ate to make your body strong...
...I mightily despise myself in my own eyes...
...Twas thou...
...Next, a voluptuous store-window mannequin is sent into the cell on a conveyor belt...
...he is full of empty phrases and senseless repetitions: "Such offerings leave me cold...
...it unravels forward and backward at the same time, explaining and rehearsing motives while it uncovers new matter, so that the past clogs up the present...
...He unavoidably enters the text and pronounces its debt to him by the ardor of his contributions, not by pieties...
...Their purpose is to take revenge on a Yorkshire colliery town in which one of their dead comrades was born and raised...
...It was a third mistake-but far from the last-for IASTA to have staged the translation delivered by William Packard, its playwright in residence, because other New York producers may now be discouraged from taking up Robert Lowell's fervently apt version of the play, which has been lying fallow under option for some years...
...And occasionally the writing falls into worn jokes or a careless listing of items...
...At Stage 73, the four one-acts called Monopoly are sketches that tamely compete with the most ground-up consequences of the network mills...
...they're something that I shun...
...Wilbur and Arrowsmith are poets serving comic poets comically...
...The third event is the arrival of mirrors with the prisoners' dinner...
...In its published version Musgrave has become one of the most respected postwar British plays, but it has not seemed to enjoy a large production that could do it justice...
...Then the boredom sets in acutely until the final event, the killing of the Anglo-Saxon prisoner...
...But the play is only limitedly sympathetic to him...
...All well and good...
...This may be a means of decoding spy messages...
...With him are three of his subordinates...
...his simultaneous effort to command an evangelical presence worthy of a Biblethumping warrior descendant of John Knox costs him dear in his relationships to his fellow actors...
...it also lacks the density and coherence of Genet's Deathwatch...
...system and defeats his rhythms...
...First, they are given orders to stop work...
...But like them it is set in a jail and protests the monotony and indignities of imprisonment...
...While the urgency of its comments on certain murders done by British troops in Cyprus has partly evaporated, Musgrave remains a pointed lesson on the psychological dangers to the oppressors in a colonial situation...
...The staging (Greenwich Mews) consists of a torpid recitation, with the actors making anxious entrances, their lips leading the way, and swooning exits into a forest of columns...
...It is a study of four men and of a community...
...The supporting cast of Ph??dre gives desperate substance to these musings...
...Part of the trouble is the transatlantic cast directed by Stuart Burge...
...they recognize their fathers in the mirror images...
...Richard Wilbur has used the end-stopped rhyme perspicuously in his Tartuffe and The Misanthrope...
...Ed Wittstein's quick-change sets, with their incorporation of sackcloth into murkily brown backgrounds, brilliantly authenticate the time and place...
...But the language itself sounds markedly flatter than it reads...
...He strove for a language that would make the play immediate, so that the emotions and interactions of the characters might reach us with something like the impact made by Racine's French on the 17th century...
...The production is a throwback to the late-Victorian bombastes curioso of Stephen Phillips ("Ha...
...Again at the Theatre de Lys here it appears smaller on stage than it does in print...
...It has taken nearly seven years for John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance to get to New York...
...She (it) is instantly stripped of clothing and taken over by the Greek, to be later "raped" by the Chinese, the most athletic of the prisoners, with a sledgehammer handle...
...Still, Musgrave contains as much material as any two usual contemporary plays...
...He and Arzoomanian are rewarded with team-playing all through the varied stunts and business, and with bold, inventive performances from Andreas Voutsinas as the Greek and James Spruill as the Negro...
...By abstracting out from his setting, Arzoomanian projects the prison as the United States...
...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Racine Uprooted, Arden Transplanted It was a mistake for The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Theater Arts (IASTA) to invite Paul-Emile Deiber to direct Ph??dre in the United States, because M. Deiber is a soci?©taire of the Com?©die-Fran?§aise, and the Com?©die's mummifications of French classical drama are barely tolerable in French, even with the misleading authority of time behind them...
...For the first time in 26 years they see themselves-their grayness, their fading eyes...
...It has nothing to do with translating Racine...
...It approves of his indignation but condemns his bloodthirstiness...
...Packard's style is junior-highschool-pedantic...
...Arzoomanian's The Coop (Actors Playhouse) is looser and less disturbing, if more purposefully poetic than Kenneth H. Brown's The Brig...
...In a program note Packard says, "-In some cases I have even tried to reproduce the French syntax and sentence structure...
...The latter creates an extraordinary moment that characterizes the play and perhaps the whole of our theater as he shuffles about trying to sing, "I'm a natural man" while polite, afternoon-tea piano music trickles through the p.a...
...Thou, was't...
...His rhymes evoke laughs-they are colossally anticlimactic-and sometimes demand mispronunciation, when the stress is made to fall on the last syllable of, say, daylight or lifetime or slavery...
...The actors with British voicesThomas Barbour, Terry Lomaxand David Doyle, who wisely keeps his American accent intact, come across effectively and help to build up the head of suspense that Burge has given them...
...a suspicion is sown and continues to grow that leisure breeds violence, if not murder...
...Or any other master dramatist...
...The "Serjeant" has deserted from the British Army (the period is about 1880), disgusted by atrocities he has witnessed in an unnamed colony...
...The others, trying hard for a Yorkshire dialect, or an approximation thereto, lose confidence in their motions...
...His lines are misshapen, the topic words are out of place...
Vol. 49 • March 1966 • No. 7
