Theatre
The Wind in the Willows (Olivier) Celestina (Lyric Hammersmith Studio)
Into the woods
Sheridan Morley
It is a curious, but infinitely English, real- isation that the outstanding, ongoing hit of Richard Eyre's administration of the National Theatre has been not Angels in America, not the Hare trilogy, not Carousel or even The Madness of George III but the story of Ratty and Badger and Moley and Toad. Alan Bennett's The Wind in the Wil- lows is now in its fourth consecutive winter season at the Olivier and likely to be a Christmas fixture there annually long after Eyre himself has left the stage.
In taking the Willows on stage, Bennett is of course doing nothing new. For 50 years or so, A.A. Milne's Toad of Toad Hall was as regular a West End Christmas treat as Peter Pan or any pantomime, and only the 1990 expiry of copyright has allowed it to be superseded by the new version. But what Bennett has done is to return to the original book for a staging that is both darker and vastly more spectacular than the economical Milne version.
A circular drum rises and spins on the Olivier stage to give us the Wild Wood, the river bank and the underground homes of Badger and Mole. Entire choirs of schoolchildren arrive to sing 'In The Bleak Midwinter', and this remains in Nick Hyt- ner's production the most spectacular sea- sonal treat that London has had to offer since the golden days of Palladium pan- tomimes just after the war.
But just as Andrew Birkin in The Lost Boys deconstructed Peter Pan and gave us instead of the old fairytale a complex psy- chological minefield ploughed up from J.M. Barrie's own terrors of homosexuality and death, both of which were to surround him in life,, so Bennett gives us the full darkness as we go into the woods in search of Badger. All the old childhood magic is still somewhere here, but so too are the territorial imperatives that Grahame hid just below ground. So too is the somewhat gay alliance of Badger and Ratty, crum- bling away as they both set out in the sub- tlest of ways to co-opt and then seduce little Moley. Bennett's text is full of sly contemporary references: the worst that can happen to Toad Hall, we learn at the last, is not the invasion of the weasels but its conversion to a leisure centre and theme park where actors will be encouraged to give solo shows. Jonathan Miller once told us this was 'a Thames-side tale of old country- house fascism', but in fact it's even more complex than that. It's a social history of Britain, with an Orwellian horse called Albert who has unaccountably strayed from Animal Farm and a Ratty straight out of Terence Rattigan. As for Toad himself, he would seem to have delusions of Ibsen's Ghosts. 'Give me the sun,' he cries patheti- cally from gaol, though it's Albert who in the end perfectly captures the Bennett/ Grahame mix of plaintive despair: 'I don't mind sunrise or sunset,' he notes gloomily, `it's what's in between that depresses me'.
Of the original team, only Michael Bryant as Badger survives: but Desmond Barrit as Toad, David Ross as Ratty and Adrian Scarborough as Moley are now into their third winter of what has become the best of theatrical family outings for the Nineties.
At a time when touring companies (not least Compass and now the English Shake- speare Company) are falling by the wayside on an almost monthly basis, we need to salute the 15th birthday of Actors Touring Company and pray they may last a little longer. They have produced 27 plays in 15 years, including ten premieres at arts cen- tres all over the country, and the latest now comes in from the road to the Lyric Ham- mersmith Studio. This is also the earliest, in that Celestina dates from 1499 and is reckoned a prime source for Romeo and Juliet. First seen over here in 1631, it is arguably the first modern play, but one which seldom gets revived for the simple reason that it actually doesn't work. Plot is tortuous without ever becoming intriguing, characterisation is minimal and Ann Fir- bank in the title role has more than a little difficulty in holding a ramshackle evening together. Both the Lyric Hammersmith and the ATC need urgently to be preserved, but alas not by productions like this.
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