Theatre
Kindred spirit
Kenneth Hurren
The Worst of Kenneth Robinson (Mermaid) Highway Shoes (New End, Hampstead) I doubt whether there's anything Kenneth Robinson says in his show that I don't agree With or that he hasn't persuaded me, at least momentarily, that I agree with. He even tells a lot of jokes that have been favourites of mine for years. On top of that, he's a former colleague who was once side by side with me in these columns writing about moving pictures. There's no getting away from the fact that this is going to be a complimentary notice.
Well, mostly. I cannot say that I altogether took to his idea of having little plastic instruments called hum-a-zoos distributed to the audience, although this may be because I could not get mine to work and when I tried again at home it just frightened the cat. In the theatre, everybody else's worked and they Made a fearful din. It is, I suppose, a legitimate stratagem for a solo performer who feels lonely in his work, but I have this builtin resistance to 'participation' entertainments when I'm never quite sure who is supPosed to be entertaining whom.
Robinson's show, you will now have deduced, is one of the Mermaid's summereconomy one-man affairs. I think it should give anyone two hours of fun. In fact, the Show lasts for two and a half hours; but after all, there are those hum-a-zoos, and there is one point when Robinson plays one himself While simultaneously strumming the piano With his left hand and manipulating a yo-yo With his right, and I feel I should have found It dismaying even if he had managed to rotate a hula hoop as well.
Fortunately, for most of the evening, he Puts away childish things and devotes himself instead to the kind of frivolities that only thinly conceal a deep and serious indignation. As he invites us, with the aid of curtIINingly selected slides, on a tour of the South 'lank arts complex—the Royal Festival Hall, the National Theatre and all the terraces and tunnels of that cultural ghetto—it is clear it:tat he is really only struggling to find a Silver lining of amusing absurdity in what he reels is a cloud no bigger than a man's clenched fist hanging over the architectural development of the capital. He is pained by the discrepancies between the picturesque traditional views of London promulgated by the Tourist Board and those that fall un °eautifully upon the eye of the beholder actually visiting the same sites and sights °day. His slides juxtapose the vanished city and the present reality. The latter, he reins arks ruefully, are 'the views of London we h°Lild be showing to tourists if we want to
keep the place to ourselves,' and then applies himself to a laconic dissection of London Transport's book on 'Dickens's London' which carefully guides the tourist to places with which Dickens may have been associated but which no longer exist, and even to the Royal Opera House on the grounds that Dickens is said to have had an appointment there with the stage manager but did not, in fact, turn up.
Other literary matters that absorb him include the memoirs of the Duchess of Bedford—which he examines at some length, wryly, but vainly, in search of the 'amusing anecdotes' about the nobility with which it is said to be replete—and a selection of pamphlets available from Her Majesty's Stationery Office, designed to accustom us to a way of life to which Robinson is plainly reluctant to become accustomed. He recoils similarly from the more eccentric manifestations of contemporary art, but, on the other hand, displays an understandable tolerance of a period of silence written into a musical composition by John Cage, in which he perhaps feels that this is a case in which the pretentiousness is counterbalanced by the relief. He also spoke approvingly of the manufacture of a blank gramophone record, to be available in juke boxes for patrons who would not mind paying for three minutes of quiet.
My only real regret about Kenneth Robinson's show (apart from those hum-a-zoos) is that his engagement precluded his accompanying me to the New End at Hampstead. It is not a regret he will share, but I feel we might have viewed the entertainment offered by 'Highway Shoes' as kindred spirits and that he would have been a congenial, if restive, compartion. 'Highway Shoes', as you will not quickly guess, is a theatrical group visiting from Cardiff, brought here through the financial assistance of the Welsh Arts Council.
The particular example of the culture of the Principality they are presenting is a double-bill of plays about, in one instance, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, and, in the other, Lenny Bruce. Their author (and director), Keith Wood, to judge from his programme notes, is an admirer of these deceased Americans on the far and sunny side of idolatry. Nevertheless, he has characterised them on the stage in the bleak, twilight years of their brief lives when whatever vivacity and talent they may once have possessed had been fatally corroded by alcohol and narcotics. Doubtless their reputations will survive the candour of Wood's little plays, but it will not be easy for audiences to survive their tedium. In the absence of Robinson, I was obliged to take such amuse ment as I could from the aforementioned programme notes in which Cassady is described as 'the ultimate American saint' and Bruce, 'a beautiful mind at work in an un beautiful world', as 'the saint in everyone's closet'. Reading the notes and watching the plays was an experience in juxtaposition that my friend at the Mermaid would have appreciated.
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