CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
Winter Journey. By Clifford Odets. (St. James's.) "Qum unimportant," said one of my colleagues of this play ; and I am sick at heart that no one has thus far ambushed and cudgelled him for a critique so recklessly encapsulated. Mr Odets' sin, I suppose, is to have written a play that could be described as "sheer theatre " ; which is to say, it has a compelling reality within its chosen medium, and does not care to invade the debating- chamber, the library or the church. And so, by an exercise of sophistry similar to that by which indolent essayists, impatiently discussing an unfamiliar poet, resort to dubbing him "a mere versifier," several popular critics have accepted Mr. Odets' skill in hitting his target as prima fade evidence that his talent is second- rate. I cannot conceive why. " Sheer theatre" (applied dis- paragingly to Mr. Odets, M. Rostand and Mr. Rattigan) will hereafter rank in my mind with : " How well these old craftsmen knew their jobs ! " (applted panegyrically to Pinero or Ibsen) as a moribund cliché beloved of intellectual laziness. The primary business of the theatre is to be theatrical ; and I refuse to countenance the argument that a play is unimportant simply because it leaves you nothing to discuss in the intervals. Winter Journey is intended, not to start you talking, but to stop you talking.
It remains well worth talking about. Mr. Odets offers us what amounts to an lbsenite thesis. A middle-aged actor, after long and willing enslavement to alcohol, is summoned from retirement to play a leading part ; we meet his wife, an inscrutable creature who, having devoted herself for a decade to the job of keeping his illusions alive, has become cynically aware of the fact that her principal value to him is as an excuse for his failure. The director of the play for which he is engaged, a spiky and intimidating young idealist, instantly decides that she is the cause of her husband's labefaction ; that her apron-strings have strangled him ; and his wanton but well-meaning irruption into the actor's domestic life precipitates (as lbsenites will have guessed) a new desperate dive into the bottle, after which the play's opening night is all but wrecked. By now both we and the director have realised that the wife is no sorceress, but rather a scapegoat for her husband's infirmity, as well as something of a martyr. Mr. Odets' climax—the Broadway first-night—I will not reveal, beyond suggesting that his introduction of an additional theme—the director's love for the wife—is ill-prepared, and hangs from the play's body with the irrelevance of a donkey's tail pinned to a fighting bull. Even so, the conclusion, that redemption is a compromise which no amount of idealism can achieve unaided, comes across with unimpaired pun- gency and passion.
The casting is most imaginative. Mr. Michael Redgrave must be as delighted as I am with his playing of the mercurial bibber ; it is the best serious performance he has given us for years. Mr. Redgrave has been passing through what his biographers will probably call" a dark period " ; lapsing, often, into a semaphoring, half-articulate style of playing which one might call algebraic, and which led him, last year at Stratford, almost to grope through his parts, in a distracted, unavailing attempt to communicate nuance. Eyes bulging, arms windmilling, he gave the impression of being possessed by an adhesive demon which was fiercely resisting exorcism; it was sometimes as if another man 's"-soul were speaking, ventri- loquially, through his reluctant jaws. He seemed, like Coleridge, to be beset by a mixture of hyper-sensitivity and insecurity which was numbing his powers of direct statement.
Frank Elgin, the drunk in Mr. Odets' play, is just such a performer ; and, in playing him, Mr. Redgrave Rages himself. " You are not a technical actor," says the director (played by Mr. Sam Wana- maker), and Mr. Redgrave, taking a hint from this true word, battles before our eyes to free himself of the technical preoccupations which have been disfiguring his work. He bounds out of his corner, like a recently defeated heavyweight, fighting, lungeing, swinging and counter-punching ; but with a revived authority and a victory in his eye, for the uncertainties that are Frank Elgin's enemies are Mr. Redgrave's, too. The ensuing duel is convulsive, sudorific and extremely moving, and the verdict is triumph. Temperamentally, Frank Elgin is a retarded boy, chronically over-mothered, and in this aspect of male psychology Mr. Redgrave is deeply versed, as his performance four years ago in Strindberg's The Father bore witness. In short, this part is Mr. Redgrave's vecial pasture ; and, the furrow having been ploughed, the transition made, we look to him never to flag again.
Beady-eyed and black-cropped, tautly ironic and especially brilliant in scorn, the young director demands the epithet "com- bustible." Mr. Wanamaker is downright dangerous. He enjoys smouldering, but, when smouldering is not enough, he throws things
—among them a medicine-bottle, several articles of clothing and a hail of half-smoked cigarettes. If there is nothing portable to hand, Mr. Wanamaker, profoundly stirred, hits himself on the forehead with a painful and audible smack. This is a most impressive piece of acting. The character itself is fascinating ; this director treats his actors in the Buchmanite-cum-revivalist manner popularised by the American Group Theatre, and is satisfied that they have grasped an idea only when one of them is sufficiently moved to hurl a chair halfway across the stage. Mr. Wanamaker pads ferally through the debris, wearing that neurotic, almost poetic look which goes, in America, with acute sinus trouble.
Miss Googie Withers, shiny and bespectacled, gives a blisteringly frank unchivalrous performance as the actor's wife, whose funda- mental loyalty has been ravaged by the frustration of too many dead years. She completes one of the most striking trios I have ever watched on a London stage ; a trio whose accomplished myrmidons include Mr. Guy Kingsley-Poynter, Mr. Arthur Hill, Mr. Robert Perceval and Miss Hazel Penwarden, all accurate and excellent. Add to this some unassuming and cleverly lit settings by Mr. Anthony Holland, and you have what seems to me (and, I hope, to Mr. Wanamaker, who directed the play) quite an important evening in the English theatre.
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