Theatre
Laughter in Court
By ALAN BRIEN A Resounding Tinkle, and The
Hole. By N. F. Simpson. (Court.)
—All My Own Work. By
Rom illy Cavan. (Bristol Old Vic.) ALL the best jokes are about serious subjects—venereal disease, politics, treachery, religion, failure and annihilation. There is no such thing as bad taste--only a peculiar and bizarre combination of flavours. And the great achievement of our new drama lies in its discovery of the tragic farce. Here the custard pies are always poisoned, the water-pistols are filled at the vitriol bottle, the leg-pulling is carried out on the rack. Laughter in the Royal Court is more cathartic than tears at the Stratford Memorial Theatre.
The secret lies simply in putting the unspeakable into words. We are not ashamed to think it or do it, to paint it or dance it, to carve it or mime it, but until now we have been unable to say it. What is it? 'It' is the most obscene word in our vocabulary and •varies from person to person, from class to class. 'le is what some people die for and some people live for. What you have and the man next door is afraid he might catch. What the man next door has and you envy. And 'it' can always be funny.
To put 'it' on the stage involves stretching the resources of the vocabulary until the seams split. This is why Shaw is eventually so unsatisfying. His ideas are no longer so audacious and his words remain commonplace. His invention was that of the clever schoolmaster instead . of the silly schoolboy. He never allowed his tongue to run away with him. 'Christopher Fry, on the other hand, is superficially one of the word-spinners, but his sentences snap in your hands. He can say nothing in a sort of dream verse which is even more impenetrable than the nightmare prose of Ramsay MacDonald. If you wipe the simile off his face, he is as blank as art egg underneath.
Mr. N. F. Simpson in his two new plays triumphantly demonstrates that it is possible to combine UNESCO and Ioncsco, and juggle hilariously with hand grenades. In A Resounding Tinkle a prematurely middle-aged young couple tick away in their stuffy living-room isolated from each other like Victorian clocks under glass. For all they know their villa might be outside the gate of Belsen, inside the gate at Aldermaston, or on the slopes of Etna. Embalmed in habit, they interweave their wildly surrealist monologues as though they were the platitudes of Mrs. Dale's Diary. They bicker passionlessly about the right name for their elephant. The husband answers a knock at the door and discovers a man who wants him to form a Government. ('That's the Prime Minister's job,' complains the husband mildly. 'Anyway we don't know anybody.') A pretty relative drops in and livens up the dull domestic evening. ('Why, Uncle Ted, you've changed your sex,' gushes the wife. 'You look lovely.') Nigel Davenport as the shaggy stoop- shouldered husband, Wendy Craig the dowdy tea-cosy of a wife, and Sheila Ballantine as the jolly epicene uncle, embroider their roles with a miniaturist's skill. The author, N. F. Simpson, and the director, William Gaskill, resist the temptation to inflate the farce to bursting point. They do not suddenly pull the rug from under their charac- ters—they quietly and burglariously - steal the furniture they are sitting on.
The Hole is more ambitious—it is a short history of philosophy as glimpsed by a variety of passers-by through an opening in the pavement. Once again it is laughter Simpson is after. But laughter involves recognition of impossible con- nections between opposite ideas. And as the electric spark of wit crackles across the semantic gap, we find ourselves accepting dangerous thoughts which we might reject in any logically argued speech. In The Hole Simpson sometimes overplays his hand and repeats the same comic devices too often. But both plays are brilliant intellectual comedy—head-splitting as well as side-splitting—and if they are not a box-office success then we do not deserve to have a drama in Britain.
Miss Romilly Cavan's All My Own Work is also in the new manner. She is not so uncompromising as Doris Lessing or N. F. Simpson, and it is often hard to decide whether she is writing a light farce with intellectual trimmings, or an intellec- tual conversation-piece with a top-dressing of foolery. But who, except a critic, cares? All My Own Work is continuously funny, provocative and interesting. The situation is that oldy about the cross-section of humanity trapped for three acts on one set—this time the cellar of a bombed house. Like all refuse from a shipwreck, the characters can be classified as flotsam, jetsam or liggan. The tart, the Ted, the Outsider, the pave- ment artist's labourer, the street fiddler are floating face down with the tide. The bolting Edwardian country-house mamma has been thrown overboard. And the progressive Tory peer, his bitchy dog-loving sister, and her pretty deb daughter are still tied to a spar. Naturally, since the play must end somehow, they all come near to understanding each other in the last five minutes.
But Miss Cavan's superiority to the ordinary commercial jerry-builder of plays lies in her refusal to take her conventions too seriously. (In answer to the question of what they are all doing there, a character replies, 'We're preserving the unities.') She also endearingly insists in sharing out her favourite jokes, so that the dialogue bristles with remarks like 'There is a special providence in the fall of a card.' She ends with no poker-work motto, but with the suggestion that understanding must start with the realisation that it is hard to start understanding., Surely even Shaftesbury Avenue will not be too nervous to allow this ver- sion of 'it' to be spoken on their stage?
Not In the Book. By Arthur Watkyn. (Criterion.) Our of the triangular spider's face the eyes look sideways, like the eyes of men in cartoons. Mr. Wilfred Hyde White contrives (whatever the part) to look like an Englishman with immense dis- honourable secrets : he is the foxy clubman, imminently expecting arrest for share-pushing, the shifty Major from the minor public school, embezzler of the imprest. Some day someone— Mr. Greene or Mr. Rattigan—will write the part for which all those light comedy roles have been but a shadowy preamble.
At the Criterion he is once more at the heart of such a comedy—he is a senior civil servant, sud- denly confronted by a comic blackmailer. Mr. Hyde White makes everyone else on the stage loOk like actors. He stands and smokes—and is. The rest—Miss Avice Landon, Mr. Sydney Tafler, Mr. Charles Heslop—are plausible, but Mr. Hyde White is undeniable.
ROBERT ROBINSON
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