Ginger Play
The Ginger Man. (Ash- croft Theatre, Croydon.) —The Boys from Syra- cuse. (Drury Lane.)- -Let's Be Frank. (Vaudeville.)
WHEN the tumult dies down, and the captains
I The Ginger Man will be and the kings of contem- porary theatre have de- parted, I suspect that left. It is about life today, and the only play with which to compare it is Look Back in Anger. The success of the latter, I believe, was due to its impact on the middle-aged, who could see in it a reflection of failing impetus and the need for urgent remedy. Its dreams of childhood and an Edwardian social existence set it firmly in a regressive past.
Now The Ginger Man is in the present, and of the present, and it is with this that we have grown up. There are no illusions beckonint from the past, there are no panaceas, no shrieks about the facts of existence. Sebastian Dangerfield is what the middle-aged have to comprehend, he is what they complain about, not what they wish they were. He has no standards except those he wants to apply, and he does not want to do anything except get along; he would prefer money to no money, and he marries young just because. He will not take any steps to deal with the future because he knows it will be the same as the present. So be watches his friend O'Keefe blundering from job to job, from hope to hope; and he needs no proof that the point of it all is that there is no point. Dangerfield thinks that they are both 'natural aristocrats,' by which he means that they are entitled to exist as they please. Ironically he amplifies it: 'All I want is my rightful place and for others to keep theirs, the common people right where they belong.' This is the true voice of Jack saying he's all right, and knowing that he's saying it.
In its perception of attitudes towards the middle class, The Ginger Man has a depth of humane understanding missing from Look Back in Anger. Dangerfield seduces the prim Miss Frost as a natural act. Pathetically Miss Frost admires him, wants him: 'I'm happy here, I'm really happy. I like things to be free and easy.' It is her guilt which drives her out in the end, and nothing to do with class barriers. I. will be objected that The Ginger Man has in- sufficient action, that Dangerfield is lazy, cruel and selfish. That's the way it is, one can only answer, and conventional moralising can only sound ironic in the circumstances. When this happens, then the world is changing.- The Ginger Man, furthermore, explains by its art; it is one of the most delicately written plays I know. Nothing could be altered without harming it, unless it be the poetising finish and the super- fluous symbol of the flower dying in the pot. This work of art was lived out by Nicol Williamson, whose Dangerfield was entirely dominating and self-destructive, as it should be. Margaret Tyzack, too, brought an intuitive and touching under- standing to the part of Miss Frost, and this high standard was maintained by Susan Hampshire and T. P. McKenna.
I can only say that although I do not live in I Mohammed Road, Dublin, and I'm not like Dangerfield (I hope), this is the climate I know, and in which it seems to me we all live.
The Boys from Syracuse is a noisy, crashing piece of non-life. I had been looking forward for months to this revival of a Rodgers and Hart musical from the best, days of their pre-war partnership. I can still see that it is a good example of its sort, for the score is good, the songs fit it more Dr less, and it must have been an improvement on the run of Broadway inanities in the late Thirties. But since then we have had Bernstein and Robbins, so that we have outgrown the blatant production and vulgar direction on which this period piece is now made to depend. The Greco-Regency sets, especially the horrid little love pavilion, are the worst of cliches, the clothes a caricature of glamour.
Bob Monkhouse can sing quite pleasantly. The other leading man sounded as if he had swallowed a rasp. None of the women can sing and they covered up their deficiencies by mock- genteel voices: 'Thees most bie lerv.' (At which. of course, the stage would be swamped with candy-floss lighting effects.) Two long ballets of tiresomely patent symbolism kept us half an hour longer than need be. There is much to be said for having revivals on gramophone records.
I don't know if this remark could be stretched to include Cicely courtneidge and Jack Hulbert in Let's Be Frank. I did once see Gay's the Word, but can't remember anything about it. A feeling for theatrical continuity may be gratified by see- ing this 'famous comedy pair,' but to judge by the thin house on the second night, not many people feel such sentimentality. It did not come across to me, I'm afraid, for this play, in so far as' it is a play at all, shows arbitrarily farcical situations, but not people caught up in them. Given this, I thought from time to time that I had grasped the convention, could even remotely enjoy it, and certainly could admire the 'comedy pair' for making so much out of it, so easily.
DAVID PRYCE,IONES
Previous page
