Whoops with a vengeance ARTS

HILARY SPURLING

This time last year there was a mood of un- doubted confidence abroad in the West End: courage, a certain panache and an atmosphere of cut-throat competition in which, it seemed safe to predict, amazing things [fight happen.

Nothing happened, or rather we have since slid several steps backwards. This year has been marked as usual in the theatre by prophecies of gathering doom, by rising costs, diminishing returns, the lure of films and mr, and by the spectre of a dying theatre in Paris and on

Broadway. looming unpleasantly close; several West End theatres have closed or stood empty,

and two bold attempts to introduce a repertory system have failed. More ominous than, any of these has been a general failure of ners;e among commercial managements, for which a- notice- able loss of direction on the part of our two major subsidised companies may perhaps be held partly to blame. The fact remains that this year's commercial productions, in sharp con- trast to last year's, suggest a lack of confidence, a kind of aimless inertia which rumours of a proposed system of state subsidy or investment will do nothing to cure: a state of affairs summed up in the revival, last week at the Hay- market, of Dodie Smith's Dear Octopus (1938) which, in the circumstances, I have no hesitation in naming play of the year.

This is what we have been working up to for the past twelve months in the West End: a piece which indulges, with a directness and an unforced simplicity postwar playwrights may well envy, our weak desire for dishonest com- forts. Dear Octopus is perhaps our most nearly perfect example of the technique to which so many plays of the 'thirties aspired: a kind of naturalism—greed, spite, snobbery, jealousy, self-satisfaction reproduced with appalling sur- face accuracy—compounded by a furtive, ex- pert tweaking of the emotions, by easy tears to sponge away any accompanying moral pr in- tellectual disturbance. Here, for instance, is our hero musing on some nameless dissatisfaction with his post as director of his firm : 'It's nothing to do with concrete success. I suppose it's-some sort of spiritual lack. Whoops, hark at mO ' - Whoops with -a vengeance. Anyone similarly pondering the frailty of commercial values may note that 1966 saw five outstanding nevi plays, three of them sponsored by commercial man- agements; and that this year we have two to set beside them—Alan Ayckbourn's Relatively Speaking and Peter Nichols's A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. Both were at best cheerful, neat and unassuming. Otherwise, apart 'from a number of more or less inoffensive, unpre- tentious potboilers, we have seen new plays in the West End by John Bowen, Alexei Arbuzov, John Mortimer, Brigid Brophy, Robert Shaw, Peter Ustinov and two from Hugh and Margaret Williams. Though clumsy by comparison, all belong to the same unctuous and anodyne school as Miss Smith's, and might have been written at any time in the past thirty years; several would hardly have seemed out of place in 1910.

The same powerful nostalgia, the same drift to the abyss, is borne out by this year's re- vivals, a sad harvest culminating in a trio of Shakespeares so bungled in production that one must regretfully conclude the West End had better not meddle in a sphere so hopelessly beyond its resources. From various manage- ments we have seen attempts on Maugham, Coward, Wilde, and two apiece on Shaw and Lonsdale : all admirably suited, one might have supposed, to the traditional subtle skills of English acting; and yet all have been treated with the same shabby, despondent, unimagina- tive indifference. This tendency towards the slipshod and the crude points no doubt to a shortage of directors; but also, and more sinister, to a certain random hopeful chanciness in the selection. Compare any one of these produc- tions with the authority and elegance of three Shaws and a Wilde two years ago, or with, say, the precision, energy and immaculate sophis- tication of Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend or Murray MacDonald's On Approval last winter.

Or take the present production, directed with considerable discretion and no enthusiasm by Frith Banbury. Dear Octopus exemplifies my point about random choice : Miss Smith's account of a golden wedding gathering is in

many ways a cheap, synthetic version of Rodney Ackland's extraordinary play, Birth-

day, written four years earlier and dealing with an equally unpleasant middle-class family also in the throes of celebration. Curiously similar

in plot, technique and situation, Birthday sub- jects its characters to a steady, humorous and objective analytical scrutiny, worlds apart from the surreptitious tear-drenched sentimentality of Dear Octopus.

Even so, something might have been sal- vaged, some irony injected, in a production less faint-hearted than Mr Banbury's. Take, for in- stance, the final scene in which, after a series of vindictive family rows, against a background of petty intrigue and vicious squabbling, our hero proposes a toast to the assembled family —a monument to gratuitous complacency and monstrous self-deception. The director at this

point has a choice: either to abandon shame and boldly reproduce what in its day, and for

a prewar audience, must have seemed a poignant quavering assault on the emotions; alternatively, to suggest an undertext or gloss more suited to contemporary taste, an atmo- sphere of after dinner indigestion, nutshells, spilt wine and grumpy, restive children, in which the audience is palpably aware of the unhappi- ness and suppressed frustrations rife in this remarkably disagreeable microcosm. Mr Ban; bury simply lowers the lights and turns away, leaving Richard Todd mumbling, glassy-eyed, to a silent, discomforted band of listeners. From embarrassment no doubt, and from a lack of guidance, these actors are throughout most wooden at precisely the moments of heightened- tension which demand, from contemporary actors, the utmost tact and sensitivity : only Lally Bowers, a hoarse, mannish, oddly sym- pathetic maiden aunt, and Jack Hulbert as the • cravenly self-indulgent grandpapa, manage to impart a delicate sense of proportion to this crudely unbalanced text. • At this rate, I shouldn't mind placing a small bet that we shall see a revival of that other

atrocious 'thirties standby, Musical Chairs— and -very likely of Dear Brutus—before next year is out; and predicting in the long run, as audiences prepared to put up with this sort of thing grow older, stiffer and more reluctant to venture out at nights, a slow death for the Lon- don theatre. Not that there is anything to be said against revivals : on the contrary, this should be—and has been—a fruitful field and one more suited to the commercial stage than the discovery of new and possibly dangerous talent (a function proper to the subsidised theatre and one which so far it has signally failed to discharge; of this more in my next).

Still, all is not yet lost: in a year in which major theatres throughout Europe, with the ex- ception of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, have been celebrating Pirandello, there has been small sign that Lon- don has so much as noted the centenary of the greatest playwright this century has produced. Rumours of a mooted production have come so far from one commercial management. And if in 1968 we may see Pirandello, why not also Rodney Ackland, whose sixtieth birthday falls next year and who is still perhaps our finest liv- ing playwright: revivals of Birthday, After October or, best of all, that subtle, powerful and searching play, product and comment on the 1940 war, The Dark River? In which case, amazing things may still happen on the West End stage.