Arts
Simple faith
Ted Whitehead
A Day Forever (Open Space) Perhaps Michael Sharp shouldn't complain about the less-than-serious critical response to his play, A Day Forever, because he has far too much fun with his material himself, vacillating between theatrical high jinks and bitter close-ups of family misery. He may have been aiming at the type of hair-raising farce Strindberg brought off in The Dance of Death, but in practice the play is more like Orton without the vicious gentility of language. The confusion is visible in Jane Smith's set, a nicely detailed working-class parlour with the obligatory china dogs on the mantelpiece and ducks flying up the walls, all of which is sur
rounded by tombstones — a bright surreal conceit which prepares us for an essay on mortality and distracts our attention from the real theme, which is the way we waste the little lives we have. The tan talising thing is that, on this theme, it struck me that Michael Sharp had quite a lot to say.
The action occurs before and after the cremation of Arthur Brown, who has dropped dead of a heart attack while decorating the parlour. His teenage daughter, Carol, accuses the mother. Mabel, of exploiting him and virtually being responsible for his death because she had nagged him into all the domestic tasks that should have been hers: 'It's not a man's job to fetch and carry.' But the mother insists that Arthur had enjoyed his tasks, and asks, in a typically provocative sidestep, 'Are you calling your father a pouf?' (tactless word for a man on the point of cremation). Mabel's own complaint is that Arthur had never given her any sexual satisfaction; but any sympathy we may feel for the widow steadily drains away as she first flirts with Carol's boyfriend, and later seduces her own brother (not that he takes much seducing — he's as randy as she is).
The scene is now set for the final confrontation between Mabel and a strange mourner who attends the cremation and returns with the others to the house, a woman who we learn has been Arthur's mistress for ten years and who is the mother of his son. The woman challenges Mabel to acknowledge that Arthur had been a good husband who had sacrificed his chance of happiness out of loyalty to his marriage and family. Mabel's reply is, 'He hadn't got the guts to leave,' which completes the image of her as an utterly self-centred hypocrite preying off the emotions of everyone else
and ruthlessly exploiting their principles. Comic relief comes from Mr Timms, a member of the local Liberal club who has lost his belief in progress and longs for the restoration of hanging; after ton many valedictory Scotches, he vomits his false teeth down the lavatory, where they are duly flushed away. This has bee° rather heavily prepared for by Mabel's
repeated question, 'Did you pull the chain?' More funny business too, from afl elderly aunt and uncle who arrive under the impression that it is Mabel who ha.5 died; the aunt collapses on seeing her, is put to bed and dies; and the uncle appears with her false teeth in a tumbler. It's odd to meet a writer who combines such a simple faith in false teeth with such a clear insight into the miseries of a society where spouses are the spice of life. (The saddest moment in the play suppose, the one when the brother s wretched wife consoles Mabel with the thought that Arthur never left her.) Michael Sharp, who is twenty-seven, left me with the impression of a man who feels sympathy with the repressed Pas' sions of family life but cannot resist the impulse to pour a bucket of cold water over them. Unfortunately the production is incredibly doleful, the director, Madhav Sharma, imposing rhythms more appror rate to Eugene O'Neill than to black comedy. The play is presented by the talented Wakefield Tricycle Compaq,' and the consolations are in the splendl° performances by June Brown as the domineering but ingratiating Mabel. Keith Barron as her brother, all facile charm and nervous lechery, Lynne Miller, as her daughter, projecting a real sense 0' grief amid all the ritual mourning, arid Geoffrey Larder as the boyfriend, unettv ous but honest, a Uriah Heep with intet rity, conveying ten shades of anxiety with a lizard flick of the eye.
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