Theatre
Our Way Of Death
By ALAN BRIEN I KNEW a New York policeman e once who had a new cure for juvenile delinquency. He had tried and rejected all the usual prescriptions—reading the Bible, cold baths, hot meals, a kick up the backside, a jaunt to the seaside, two years on kv psychiatrist's couch and six months on a convict's bunk. His formula was simple— the adjective came before, and governed, the noun so all you had to do was to get rid of the juvenility and the delinquency would take care of itself. To all those of us who grew up in New Guinea with Margaret Mead, and came of age in Samoa with Geoffrey Gorer, the method was 'obvious. The young people of modern capitalist society must be provided with a carefully engi- neered initiation ordeal—complicated, painful, difficult and unnerving—which would formally admit them to the splendours and miseries of adulthood as soon as their bodies and minds were ready to suffer them. Brooklyn College gave him a DPI. The Police Commissioner gave him a funny look. And there the matter rests. But what my friend forgot was that the initiation already exists. In the nineteenth century it was Work—young people matriculated in the mines and factories and chimneys and servants' basements and shop- assistants' dormitories. In the twentieth it is War. It is the central indictment of our social system that our Way of Life only has meaning when it is also a way of death—only then is there com- radeship, adventure, ambition and heroism with- out crime.
The cinema is full of films showing boy-into- man on the battlefield. But almost always—at any rate in British films—the moral is a thinly dis- guised commercial for the class system. The Long and the Short and the Tall would be a rarity if it simply transferred this sort of army on to the stage. But it does far more than that. It eliminates every rank above sergeant and shows us seven soldiers reflected in a polished toe-cap. They are not the usual background frieze of regional mascots. Nor are they the familiar crazy gang of low comedians in digs in Blackpool. Nor are they just. seven heroes of labour. The author, Willis Hall, knows that clothes often do make the man. Instead, his characters have the noisy, irritating, nerve-racking otherness of that group of soldiers who barricade themselves in the next carriage to you on any Saturday night train out of Paddington.
Like all random samples of humanity packed in one box with a tight lid, they begin by playing the cliche roles that their fellows cast for them. There is the sergeant in charge who has been through everything before—whatever it is, from beer and women to blood and mud. There is the London wide-boy who always has an answer even if he didn't hear the question—in civvy street he was probably an ETU shop steward. There is a lugubrious, middle-aged Northerner, supporting a wife, four children and a moustache, a bloated Scot who thinks a joke is a challenge to a fight, an astonished cave-Welshman perpetually baffled by Anglo-Saxon attitudes, a pip-squeak of a kid frightened of women, NCOs and Japs in that order, and a hectoring, rank-happy corporal.
These are clichés of real life. But they are still cliches. Mr. Hall shows them growing into indi- viduals as they are painfully initiated into humanity through the barbaric ceremony of battle. His platoon is caught in a jungle hut behind the lines in Malaya as Singapore falls to the invading Japs. The seven men begin to probe each other, to expose the flesh behind the uniform. They come of age when they learn that though adults still play parts they have to write their own dialogue. Mr. Hall's dialogue is just on the other side of naturalism—imaginative writing in the vocabulary of reality. The soldiers talk of the allotment and the council house, the tight in the pub, the cuddle in the park, the responsibility of being a lance-corporal. Most of the time there is a silent eighth member of the group.—an ageless ancient of a Jap prisoner. Gradually he becomes the focus of their moral dilemma. Can you kill another human being, here, now, this moment, after he has smoked your cigarette? And the sergeant preaches the secular sermon for today on the text from an unwritten King's Regulation —'Whatever it is, when the time comes you'll do it.'
Some of the time in recapitulating the theme of The Long and the Short and the Tall (I wish the producers had kept the original title, The Disciplines of War) I have slipped over into de- scribing what I think Mr. Hall intended to do rather than what he has actually done. But what he has actually done is startling enough—he has put a group of working-class people on the stage as people with all their wit, and vulgarity, and honesty, and gullibility, and strength. Personally, I regret that there is almost no conversation about jobs—one of the most fruitful and fascinating of all bat:rack-room topics. And I wish he had not made the concession to copybook theatre by two dramatic twists—the weakling killing the first Jap and the bully showing the white flag. As director, Lindsay AnderSon has achieved an astonishing degree of unforced, .easy ensemble playing from his brilliant team of young players. Peter O'Toole, as 877 Private Bainforth, has exactly the right blend of sardonic irreverence and aggressive satire for the unspoiled Jimmy Porter from the Lower Depths. Even his habit of swallowing his lines with a muttered sneer, so that only the first two rows of the house can catch them, is not so much irritating as audacious. The arrogant casualness of this performance is such that I would not have been surprised or shocked if he had absentmindedly gone to sleep in the cor- ner in the middle of one of his comic diatribes. Robert Shaw, as the sergeant, packs enormous power and command into a role which, but for , one speech, entirely lacks any obvious oppor- tunities for rhetorical exhibitionism. And Tenji Takaki, as the Japanese prisoner—the longest non-speaking all-acting part in any drama —is a mosaic of tiny subtleties. Lindsay Ander- son's direction lacked one strength which was so impressive in Peter Dews's production of the play at Edinburgh with an amateur cast. I missed the recurring sense of danger, of unseen Things bigger than all of us, outside the windows. Mr. Dews stressed this first of all by making his soldiers much more worried and flurried and on edge after they first scrambled into the deserted hut. Secondly, he introduced many long, almost unbearably long, pauses into the dialogue so that the audience's mind inevitably began to stray off stage and into the waiting jungle beyond. The Long and the Short and the Tall is not a great play, but it is a great portent. It is another one of the trail-blazers towards a live British theatre, of which the other pioneers have been Jeremy Kingston's No Concern of Mine, Peter Shaffer's Five Finger Exercise, John Arden's Live Like Pigs, Romilly Cavan's All My Own Work, Roger Gellert's Quaint Honour, Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey, Donald Howarth's The Lady on the Barometer, Doris Lessing's Each His Own Wilderness, N. F. Simpson's Resounding Tinkle, Osborne's George Dillon and Brendan Behan's The Hostage.
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