THE SPECTATOR
• ARTS • LETTERS • MONEY. LEISURE THEATRE
National disasters
KENNETH HURREN
Like some unlucky airline company that puts a lavish new advertising campaign under way the day before its proudest jet disintegrates over the ocean, the National Theatre announced last week that from mid-June the company would be appear- ing not only at the Old Vic but at the New Theatre as well, this arrangement to con- tinue until their own theatre is completed on the South Batik about the end of 1973. The crash that immediately followed was the premiere of Coriolanus, a hybrid, or bastard, production (by Brecht out of Shakespeare by rape) which is among the National's most doleful occasions.
The tenancy of two theatres will mean, said last week's hopeful statement, that `the company can be seen by nearly 15.000 people each week.' Whether they wit/ be is, perhaps, another matter (an imponder- able having to do with how comfortably, and for how long, forMer laurels can be rested upon); and whether, in fact, they should be is something about which I begin to feel increasingly dubious. The timing of the expansionist announcement might have seemed, to a casual observer, sheer bad luck. A closer look at the record reveals few recent times when it might have been more propitious. The National, Theatre, under the direc- tion of Sir Laurence Olivier (as he then was), commenced operations at the Old Vic in the autumn of 1963, and for very nearly four years most of us were delighted with its performance. There were the occasional failures, but triumphs predominated; the repertory was stimu- latingly varied; a hand-picked group of contemporary dramatists contributed fine original work; and among the players, de- pendable veterans and hitherto .untested young players alike developed and sharp- ened their talents. It is, I think, beyond question that the captaincy of Olivier him- self was primarily responsible for this agreeable state of affairs.
Confirmation of this view is implicit in the fact that it was around the summer of 1967 that the rot began to set in. Olivier, stricken by cancer, was persuaded that the manifold responsibilities of administration, production and acting were beyond the re- sources of a man in indifferent health. Understandably he began to shed some of the load, but the unhappy truth is that no one seems to, have proved capable of shouldering it in the same inspirational fashion. The Three Sisters, which he had in rehearsal in the summer'of 1967, was argu- ably the high peak of the National's achievements; since then, the company's record has been the reverse of its first four years. Instead of only occasional failures we have had only the occasional success. The ghastlier events come glumly to mind : those irksomely self-indulgent pro- ductions of Tyrone Guthrie (Vo/pone and Tartuffe) and Peter Brook (Seneca's Oedipus); the Brecht re-write of Marlowe's Edward II, banal and tedious on a scale monumental even for the German baron of boredom; a petrifyingly unfunny Triple Bill of comedies apparently chosen as some sort of publicity stunt, one of them having been written by John Lennon; a disreputable and vulgar reading of The Way of the World; a production of Web- ster's The White Devil so absurdly tricked out with touches of bizarre eroticism that it was hard to believe that the work was not being intentionally parodied; woefully inadequate adaptations • of Cervantes, Rostand and Dostoievsky; and, only this year, an aggressively pretentious produc- tion of Arrabal's preposterous The Archi- tect and the Emperor, mounted by a foreign director specially imported for the dire occasion.
Which brings us to last week's abysmal Coriolanus, for which further alien assist- ance was enlisted in the persons of Manfred Wekwerth and Joachim Ten- schert, a brace of Brecht disciples from East Berlin, who evidently arrived with the notion that they were to reproduce their master's Marxist interpretation of the work. That, as it happened, was not quite the idea: the unadulterated, unre- vised Shakespearian text was to be used, but Brechtian methods were to be applied in its production. This was folly of a high order, as seems to have been divined in- stantly by Christopher Plummer, who had
been booked for the title role but who withdrew at an early stage of rehearsals, leaving Anthony Hopkins to add to his season's misfortunes by taking on the job.
The not unpercipient Hopkins had earlier escaped The Idiot as Plummer es- caped Coriolanus—by withdrawing after a disagreement with the director—but pre- sumably decided to push his luck no fur- ther and has since taken on three major roles in the teeth of absurdities visited upon him by authors, designers and direc- tors. As Coriolanus, he falls in loyally with the Wekwerth-Tenschert travesty, but Shakespeare's tragic hero has no hope of surviving a production that sees him as an arrogant, war-drunk bully-boy, con- temptuous of the honest proletariat. Shakespeare's impartial view may not be much to the taste of our democratic times, but that can scarcely excuse a performance that flouts the meaning of almost every line. The production is untenable in its premises, an unspeakable bore in per- formance, and in point of the most ele- mentary details—such as the failure to weight the flimsy curtains which swish irritatingly across the stage between scenes,. so that they billow out to reveal the harassed scene-shifters at work—‘a dis- grace to reputable professionalism.
The ensemble playing, as in so many of the National's recent productions, is in slovenly and sorry contrast to the finely calculated work of the early years. There are over eighty players on the payroll at present, but I doubt if more than about a quarter of them are up to the quality that should be accepted as a matter of course in this organisation. Clearly they are not being recruited with the old flair. Lord Olivier might, with advantage, give this aspect of the company some priority among the calls upon his time. In all respects, of course, he has cause for con- cern over what has been going wrong, and he would be wise to be considering now those areas in which, during the last four years, he has delegated authority and responsibility, and to be asking himself, on behalf of us all, whether he can be entirely sanguine about the future of the National Theatre when he is himself obliged to relinquish the top banana.
Elsewhere in town: Confrontation, at the Roundhouse, is a naive attempt to draw a lesson for modern America from poli- tical events in Ancient Rome, and a lot of funny things happen on the way to the Forum; but none of them, I fear, are so intended; at Hampstead, Leonard Rossiter places his familiar portfolio of lip-curlings and eye-rollings at the comic service of the crippled protagonist of Peter Ransley's Disabled, which shapes up initially as a charmless assault on the welfare services before plunging into pseudo-Freudian fantasy to come up with the conclusion that you don't have to be physically crippled to be sexually de- prived; and The Foursome, at the For- tune, is a look at the sex life of uncouth young Liverpudlians by E. A. Whitehead, who communicates his revulsion without making satisfactory drama of it.
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