REVIEW OF THE ARTS
Kenneth Hurren on magic, goulash and applesauce
The opening number of the new American show, Pippin, at Her Majesty's has most of the cast bouncing about the stage proclaiming, "We got magic to do," and while this turns out to be an idle and foolish boast, I'm glad they brought the matter up. It reminds everybody that the theatre is still a place where magic does get done, though it doesn't, God knows, happen often. There is a great deal of carefully calculated gaiety, and there are moments of beauty or charm or poignancy, usually the result of expert, orderly writing or of superior techniques of acting, or quite possibly both. Magic, though, is something else again, something Supernaturally stunning and, of course, hostile to any rational analysis. There is nothing of this sort in Pippin (to which I may eventually get irritably back), but on the outskirts of the parish, at the Greenwich Theatre, the kind of magic that the more sentimental of us theatre buffs dream about is reassuringly available in the performance of a lady named Elizabeth Bergner. No element of nostalgia assails me in regard to Miss Bergner who was to me, until last week, no more than a dimly remembered legend. Her great days, I glean from the programme note, were in the 'twenties and 'thirties but it is hard to believe that she was ever more captivating than she is currently at Greenwich. She is a small woman,
and perhaps not beautiful, as she may once have been, though the radiance and mischief in her face make the matter immaterial; she moves restlessly but expressively, her hands fluttering or else plunged in the pockets of the trouser-suit she wears for her part, which is that of a woman who, at the age of seventy or thereabouts, is still disconcertingly at the mercy of love and jealousy; her voice is not especially mellifluous, but has the faculty of communicating either rapture or melancholy as few other actresses can ever have done.
Despite all this, I'm not sure that Miss Bergner would be an asset to every play, since the peculiarly hypnotic quality she exudes makes it difficult to pay attention to anything else that may be going on. In the case of her present vehicle, though. I daresay this is all for the best. Catsplay, the translated work of one Istvan Orkeny, is a rather sloppy dish of Hungarian goulash, its story told largely through an exchange of letters between two elderly sisters, one wealthy, crippled and played with tactful resignation by Margaret Rawlings, the other more reluctant to succumb to the encroachments of age and still coquetting with an old admirer when she is not conversing in ' miaows ' with a neighbour whose husband, unsurprisingly, has long ago deserted her. It is one of the incidental wonders of Miss Bergner's performance that its magic survives not only the whimsy of these encounters but also the climactic embarrassments of a scene in which she is actually required to scamper about on,, all fours in a feline impersonation.
There could be a touch of magic, too, in the way Franco Zeffirelli and a cast of National Theatre players are handling Eduardo de Filippo's Saturday Sunday Monday at the Old Vic. This is a busting little comedy about a Neapolitan 'family weekend, heavily reliant on the cliches of Italian excitability and volubility, which generally ceased to interest me as comedy material about twenty years ago, but somehow it all comes out fresh and funny, and sometimes rather touching.
I cannot help feeling that there is a body of opinion at the National Theatre that holds it to be somehow demeaning to use the stage of that august institution to put on anything so essentially inconsequential, and just in case you should think the company has nothing better to do than entertain you, they've got out a programme-book stuffed with pretentious assessments of the piece by Italian critics who write of its " bitter statement ... that life in our era is withdrawing more and more from human contact and integrity," of its blending "the colourful features of a comedy of manners with subtle and evocative elements of psychological insight" and of its " laying bare, with mordant vigour, the miseries and sadness of daily life."
This is amusingly lofty language (or, to put it another way, applesauce) to use of a bundle of incidents which resemble nothing so much as an omnibus edition of a Neapolitan Waggoners' Walk, and which are given such distinction as they possess by the sprightly gifts of the National's players under Zeffirelli's vivacious direction.
Frank Finlay and Joan Plowright are at the centre of the action as a middle-aged couple whose marriage is smouldering to a critical flashpoint because neither has communicated to the other the precise reasons for their disgruntlements. There's a perfectly valid theme here about the awful insidiousness of jealously, and the husband's unjustified suspicions and torments are nicely observed, but the situation is not, perhaps, the most strikingly unusual one to be found in domestic drama. The performances of Finlay and Miss Plowright, however, lift it above the run-of-the-mill; they're alio, for the most part, plausibly Italianate, although Miss Plowright does tend to slip back to Scunthorpe in moments of stress.
Around these two is an abundance of picturesque subordinate characters, nearly all of them very finely played. Nicholas Clay and Louise Purnell as two of the couple's children, and Anna Carteret as the maid are the most notable if you must have names; and Laurence Olivier himself signs off as Director of the National Theatre with an impish peripheral performance as the grandfather of the household, a retired hatter whose main residual interest in life is re-blocking the headgear of unsuspecting guests, an activity that invariably results in every gentleman visitor leaving with a hat two sizes larger than the one with which he arrived.
Getting back to the unmagical Pippin,as I fear I must, it has to do with a son of Charlemagne (presumably fictional) and his en
deavours to find a way of life suitable to his temperament. He is not attracted sensationally by war, revolution or even lust, though all are handsomely choreographed by Bob Fosse, and eventually settles rather coyly for setting up house with a comely young widow. His quest is observed in contemporary terms, which is rather like trying
to blend Camelot with Hair, a fetching notion that the writers have neither the ingenuity nor the wit to sustain, and most of the time Pippin is a childish and enervating bore.
with the utmost discretion: they make their points and evanesce. One possible fault in the work's construction is the lengthy on stage torture of Grandier it is' the political and social processes that lead to it that are of more significance — but the way Dexter handles it is extraordinarily powerful: each hammer blow on _ the ghastly leg-breaker is matched by multiple, pulsating images of Grandier's agonised face; earlier Jeanne's enema is given identical visual accompaniment: a notion with uncomfortable reverberations.
The use of amplified sound of either devilish male voices issuing from nun's mouths, or of Jeanne's voice itself weirdly double-echoed, is managed with split-second accuracy. With Andy Phillips's bright and purposeful lighting, we have here an example of technical proficiency seldom seen in the opera house. The large cast is faultless; Josephine Barstow's psychotic Jeanne is a superb 13ortrait, and Grandier is played (appropriately enough since the last we see of him is a pile of ashes being nuzzled, Salome-like, by Jeanne) by Geoffrey Chard with calm intensity. Paul Crook and Robert Ferguson stand out in supporting roles. The Devils is in repertory until early December. I cannot recommend it too strongly.
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