The Arts Musical Evenings

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. (Strand.) House of Cards. (Phoe- nix.)—At the Drop of Another Hat. (Hay- market.) IT is an excellent idea to put new life into the old

Greek and Latin comedies.

year the secretary writes to classics masters and bishops who if they haven't heard of it before, or happen to have been at the same college,

view the idea with 'enthusiasm. The reluctant

school turns out to make its first live acquain- tance with the Greek drama, and a few neigh- bouring old ladies come along too, bearing the original text. Whether the players are ever in- vited again depends on the liberality of the staff, but the odd thing is that more often than not people are most scandalised by the few situations and lines of Aristophanes that have remained un- altered. The old plays provide the plot, the characters, the object of satire and the licence to be as outrageous or as improbable as you please. They are in fact remarkably close to a modern revue with a continuous plot.

One had been looking forward, then, to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the

Forum which is based on the works of Plautus,

for some weeks. It is disappointing mainly be- . cause at bottom it has only one joke, that it must be funny to have modern actors dressed in a

rare assortment of togas doing a play that the Romans used to do more than 2,000 years ago. And indeed it it is funny for a while. The out- rageous amorality of it all, with its flaunted selection of eunuchs, pimps, virgins and whores, so much greater than anything that would be permitted now, is superb. Frankie Howerd is

made to be a comic slave, with disaster always just over his shoulder, and there is some classic

knockabout with men dressed as women just avoiding being ravished, and some amusing con- fusions of identity.

There are also some obvious but good jokes arising out of the text, like 'You won't ever be anything else but a eunuch.' But this is not

enough. One is constantly expecting Frankie Howerd to say something much funnier than he

actually does (though he has one brilliantly characteristic line about a mule sweating) and as for good lines the other stars are pretty much

non-starters. The clever ideas of introducing half a dozen bunny-like whores stops dead after their first appearance; climaxes, the adaptors should note, are usually better at the end. One can't help feeling there should have been far more topical allusions introduced to give it some bite. As for the lyrics, what is there to say of the man who writes as one of his key choruses, 'You're lovely, you're absolutely lovely,' even if he does use it again with comic effect later, which is sur- prising as Mr. Sondheim also wrote the lyrics for West Side Story. The whole show lacked a con- fidence which it may pick up later.

House of Cards is another musical adaptation from the drama, this time Ostrovsky's Even a Wise Man Stumbles, which I don't know. It is musically more ambitious, but rather less re- hearsed than Forum. It lacks not confidence, but a unified style. The story is a good one, of a ruth-

less but honest Russian keeping a diary of the private life of the Society he wants to enter, till its discovery exposes both his ruthlessness and his honesty. It has lots of good opportunities for some varied choruses as well as some sharp and even dramatic dialogue. But the players go into it with such careless panache that they tend to pull it apart. Nor does any proper thought seem to have been given to either costumes or set. It is the sort of production that one knows could improve beyond measure, but doubts if it will survive to do so.

I don't like Donald Swann. He has some gifts both as an accompanist and as a musical

parodist, but his original compositions are much too like imitations to have any effect of their own. When occasionally he has the stage to him- self singing his unintelligible little songs, my fury grows in me. Having declared this, perhaps, prejudice, I may say that At the Drop of Another Nat has some delightful moments. Michael Flanders's conversational style is a joy and his comments a good deal sharper than is often thought, for all his benign disguise. There is a very tight new song about de Gaulle, an intri- cate fitting of words to part of the Mozart Horn Concerto and some welcome repeats of their