Peter Fischer on World Theatre Season disenchantment
The World Theatre Season is . . nn it was a gift-horse — a menagerie of gift-horses. This is true fl more senses than one, includ'ng the personal aspect that a resident foreign journalist can be duly and truly grateful to its management for providing him with Press facilities — free tickets, that IS, plus free translation transistors, although I often was luckier than others in being able to do ‘vithout that ingenious but injurious condom for international intercourse. The kind of openarmed assistance which even visiting critics find in Continental theatres is rare in London. and rare too at the Royal Shakespeare during the rest of the year, So this contrast was an extra little sYmptom of the whiff of foreign air blowing through the Aldwych these last ten spring seasons. But however grateful a critic has to look a gift-horse in the mouth and Point at the bad teeth of which there were plenty in the jaws of this undernourished mare.
Of course, the World Theatre Seasons have not been a total failure. But, taken as a whole, they have tended to disgrace and to discredit London's reputation, as the world's theatrical capital. In ,London, of all places, they should have been a sort ot theatrical Olympics, an.international showcase, exchange and pharos to guide the world. In fact, the WTS is essentially a local attraction, offering Londoners varied dishes which any provincial town might have been proud to serve for the entertainment of its ratepayers, and which several such places (Wiesbaden, say) do provide. True enough, it had chosen the workaday word ' Season ' rather than the more ambitious term ' festival'. Yet its name was a sugges tively ambiguous one. This 'World Theatre' turned out to
mean no more than theatre from other parts of the world; what could be expected was an elite of theatrum mundi.
Such expectations were encouraged by the most auspicious cir cumstances of its start in Shakespeare's quatercentenary year when companies were honoured by invitations to present their own national bouquets at the London shrine•that bore his name. The exclusion of British com. panies, which has unaccountably remained part of the Season's format, sprang from this original idea. The noble and fitting gesture happened also to be a shrewd and convenient move to give the Royal Shakespeare Company the best of both worlds — the Bardic bumper tourist trade at Stratford as well as time for a Bardic tour around the world whilst other people were keeping the Aldwych filled. In that very special year, it also made sense to select guests of an establishment stature ---; National Theatres, or something like it, preferably presenting their own classics. Yet even two years later Peter Daubeny (lately knighted for these services) was still professing that his policy was to" resist playing safe with only the famous ensembles." Well, did he? He was also hoping the Aldwych would become an "international testing ground for world drama." Well it ' did — in the negative sense that, another two years later, I found myself summarising in my dispatches a ten-week Season as a " hara-kiri" of reputations with "not a single example of really important, let alone modern, dramatic art." It was hard to understand that practically all my British colleagues were regularly ritually and rapturously rhapsodising about the cornucopious gifts poured out at the Aldwych. Perhaps as a foreigner, I felt less motivated than others by polite respect due to foreign visitors to overlobk the home truth that English plays and English acting (though not so much English production) were, with few exceptions, towering head and shoulders above the foreign offerings and that even famous foreign actors from famous foreign companies were — well, yes, slicker and smugger perhaps but hardly better than some of the young unknowns to be seen on the London fringe any day.
In fact, I could never suppress a sneaking suspicion that the international gift-horse was really a chauvinistic Trojan horse designed to demonstrate ad oculos the superiority of English theatre. It certainly did that, But, of course, I am sure that such perfidious intention was far from Peter Daubeny's mind, My more real and more awful, suspicion is that he didn't know the difference. No serious judge would have accepted for an international platform the half-baked efforts of the Cinoherni Klub from Prague, which he praised as "sublime ", or the haphazard acting of the ensemble from Bremen, although it's true that this theatre was making a name for itself in its own country at the tifne on account of the style being developed by its then chief producer, Peter Zadek (back this year as Intendant of the Bochum Playhouse). It is clear from cases such as these that one of the two main reasons why the World Theatre Season misfired as sadly as it did was the personality of its artistic director.
That he never had a chance to exercise any ' artistic direction ' was, of course, not his fault but that of the severe financial limitations. Lacking British government subsidies, he had to make do with what gift-horses he could get from countries keen to subsidise their cultural life and cultural propaganda and he did not look them in the mouth.
There would be nothing wrong with the fact that at least one company from a communist country, if not two, showed up each year, if they had offered
memorable theatre. Some . did; others, such as the Moscow Art Theatre, contributed the most mummified bourgeois museum pieces of the lot even if some were iberally laced with Soviet hagiography. As East European dramatic literature does not boast many great names apart from that honorary English playwright, Chekhov, it had to be artificially supplemented by countless Stage versions of Russian novels which as plays were second-hand and rarely more than second-rate, They were presented not only by Russians but by Czechs and Poles as well, including that strange curio, The Possessed from Dostoievsky's Russian novel, adapted in French by Camus, produced in Polish by Wajda, and listened to on English transistor sets —
World Theatre indeed! It must be on account of its glamorous galaxy of authors that this well-nigh unintelligible potted version with its impressively bleak images did win considerable acclaim For another corollary of financial restrictions was that boxoffice success had to breed boxoffice success, so that the constant return of the same people, often with the same productions,
introduced uniformity into variety. There was also a strong. relation between the interests of the box-office and those of the large Polish and Italian communities in London and the frequent French appearances surely owed something to the fact that French is the only foreign language which the English middle classes have any pretension of knowing. Understandable as such compromises may have been, they were compromising for a world theatre gathering.
Astonishingly • and charismatically, the man who has actually described himself (to Terry Coleman) as a descendant of Thor. the Nordic god, somehow managed to maintain the mythic'al belief that his World Theatre Season was revered as a Valhalla
among I world's theatres with whose heroes he was pictured in every programme.
The then Mr Daubeny did hit on some real masterpieces, of course, which need no belated advocacy here. One which went unrecognised was Schiller's Kabale und Liebe in Hans Hollman's Berlin production. Daubeny, nevely no doubt, forestalled its true appreciation by introducing it to the press as " the best play by the German classic." No one would regard this youthful piece as Schiller's best, and no wonder the critics were disappointed. Classic he was, of course, but the artistic director missed the point of this audacious and controversial production which, without clumsily updating the .burgerliche Trauerspiel, revealed the classic as a contemporary of the protesting young. The result was that British critics saw in it nothing but "heavy Teutonic mediocrity." On the other hand, similar but blander attempts by the French to modernise a classic tended to be hailed as " Gallic " and " stylish." The programme and its presentation encouraged such cosy confirmation of national cliché which an international event should have helped to correct.
Frankly I welcome the end of the present series of World Theatre Seasons. But, particularly after the final demise of the Th6Stre des Nations, in Paris, an international drama festival in London remains an important idea. It should make a fresh start on an entirely new pattern. And it would be useful to have a new name to overcome the unfortunate memory of the World Theatre Season.
Peter Fischer is the London arts correspondent of West Berlin Radio and a number of continental newspapers.
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