CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
'Marching Song. By John Whiting. (St. Martin's.)—Hippo Dancing. By Robert Morley. (Globe.)
JOHN WHITING'S new play starts from a good situation: a general from a defeated country returns home to his mistress after being shut up in a camp for seven years. But this is only temporary: he is to be brought to trial as being responsible for the defeat— a move forced on the Chancellor by the Parliamentary opposition. But the Chan- cellor doesn't want any trial: it would harm national unity. So the general must commit suicide, and, as he is no longer in love with Catherine de Troyes, his mistress, in spite of the charm Diana Wynyard gives to the part, this would seem to be his obvious way out— Particularly as the Chancellor has thought- fully supplied him with a (presumably) Painless means of escape. However, among the inmates of the Festival of Britain Pavilion wher,e Catherine de Troyes lives is (11 existentialist girl, jeans and all, who gives him back the will to love and to live, Who symbolises for' him the ray of hope left in the camp, the goat-herd's love-songs on the hillside above the barbed wire. So the general will not kill himself—not until he learns that the songs which kept him alive for seven years were obscene, were, in fact, addressed to goats. Then he does kill himself and is thus able to preserve his illu- sions about the existentialist Dido Morgen intact ('Dido,' I suppose, because she delays this Aeneas from sailing for the Shores of death).
This is a good plot: the symbolism is effective and the tension would be preserved throughout—if it were not for certain aspects of the treatment. To begin with, there are some loose rends. How do the doctor, the Priest and the decayed Hollywood director Whom Catherine de Troyes keeps in her house advance the action of the play ? Then there is the character of Rupert Forster himself. We are told that he has been responsible for the massacre of some hundreds of children during the war, has Consequently 'held up the advance for a day and then gone on as before, but that, in some unexplained way, this has been the ,torning-point of his life (as well it might be). Now, my reaction to a massacre of Children perpetrated for the most laudable of military motives is that the GOC of such an 9Peration is a nasty piece of work, but this is too obvious for Mr. Whiting. Rupert Forster, says the existentialist girl, is a good man. Why? Because he has some remorse,
have he doesn't advance as he should have done, because he has mystical what-nots ever afterwards about the whole business? BY drawing the rather smelly red herring across a perfectly sound plot Mr. Whiting Muddles his whole play. The Prussian- general type of character is only justifiable In terms of power or in terms of conditioned PsYchology. He is not justifiable in terms " good and evil; his code of obedience to Orders is not a moral code. From the Moment Rupert Forster starts to worry about whether his actions are good or bad, !le ceases to be credible, and even Robert rlemYng's excellent authoritarian presen-
tation of him cannot make us believe in this man of iron with a soft centre. When he begins to levitate into the empyrean, the play slows down to a dead stop. The situation is not improved by Mr. Whiting's dialogue, which only grips during the scene between the Chancellor and the general. The former character is played by Ernest Thesiger, which probably explains why the tension mounts when he is on the stage. Mr. Thesiger is, as usual, entirely convincing to watch. Such success as this play may have it will owe to the acting and to a good original idea. Its failure is the author's failure to work out his situation either in adequately human or adequately philo- sophical terms.
• Hippo Dancing is an adaptation from the French, though one would hardly gather so from the programme. Andre Roussin wrote a play called Les Oeufs de l'Autruche which dealt with a middle-class father who finds that one of his sons is a homosexual and wants to become a dress-designer and that the other is being kept by an Italian countess. Robert Morley has transferred this ghoulish scene from Paris to Golders Green with suitable modifications: the dress-designer son . doesn't appear on the stage, the gigolo son is older and the countess younger, they give up her money and make it legal. However, Mr. Morley is very much in his element as a suburban tyrant; he strides across his hideous domain like Bligh on the deck of the Bounty, making everyone's life a misery and deceiving himself as to everyone else's feelings about him. Of course, it all ends happily, but not before Mr. Morley has been by turns comic, pathetic and calm. Peace is restored to the suburbs, but one is left with a horrid sus- picion. Do things like this go on in Golders Green? Is there such a place?
ANTHONY HARTLEY
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