THEATRE

Come again

HILARY SPURLING

Song of the Lusitanian Bogey and God is a (Guess What?) (Negro Ensemble Company at the Aldwych) She Stoops to Conquer (Garrick) If, in the year 2001. any memory remains— and supposing anyone should question me about this year's World Theatre Season— then it will be of the brief visit of Otomar Krejca's Theatre Behind the Gate from Prague. The company spent one week in London and gave four plays, among them The Three Sisters in a production as startling and entrancing as, say, the several programmes given by the Noh Theatre of Japan in 1967, or the Compagnia del Giovani in Pirandello's The Rules of the Game the year before. These are what I take to be the great high points of Mr Daubeny's World Theatre at the Aldwych: occasions of an almost supernatural brilliance, of fierce and subtle passion captured by means of a dis- cipline so severe, so exacting and at the same time so exquisite that anybody who was present remains for ever after a marked man.

Of Mr Krejca's other three productions, the most delightful was The Green Cockatoo by the Viennese playwright, Arthur Schnitzler : an immensely deft manipulation of romantic themes, set in 1789 in a Parisian inn fre- quented by the fashionable nobility in search of vicarious depravity and crime. The land- lord caters to this taste with a troupe of actors who, while the mob outside storms the Bastille, perform a counterpoint of small, tense, vicious dramas below stairs. Perhaps the strangest moment of this strange and tantalising play comes as the curtain rises, after a burst of garish music, on a tavern crammed with heavy wooden furniture, empty save for three stiff figures sprawled in drink or death over a table at the back, and sepulchrally still. What follows—an intricate game of true or false played, on shift- ing ground beween real and artificial pain, by actors dressed as whores or murderers for the benefit of others impersonating their sleek, suave, vulpine audience—demonstrated again the exhilarating precision of this company, and the marvellously firm and shapely lines imposed by the director. Schnitzler wrote a quan- tity of plays which, on the strength of this one, might well repay investigation by any management in search of an author. The com- pany gave three performances in London of ? he Three Sisters, two of The Green Cockatoo; I dearly hope we may see both again, along with anything else they care to bring, as. soon and as often as possible.

Which brings us to the Negro Ensemble Company, currently installed at the Aldwych, and whose welcome has been, for reasons not

entirely clear to me, at times a trifle churlish. It is not simply that this company—founded barely two years ago with funds from the Ford Foundation—has evolved already a style of great visual elegance and assurance;

they bring to their chosen tricky themes a gaiety and humour normally excluded from what, in this country at any rate, is considered sacred ground—sacred for the most .part to an

alarming combination of belligerence and banality. Admittedly, Peter Weiss's Song of the Lusitanian Bogey—a recital of iniquity and

woe in Portuguese Angola—still seems uncon- scionably trite; but that is a fault of the play- wright, not the company, who compensate with some singularly pleasing patterns of move- ment and a soothing jazz accompaniment. By

comparison, Ray McIver's God is a (Guess What?) has, in spite of its uninviting title, an engaging nonchalance and a brisk, airy wit.

Two glum coons with whitewashed faces and drooping crimson mouths, their bodies

arranged in attitudes of the most delicate de- jection, begin the play with a lament for these dismal modern times. Both agree that a white

man has one overriding duty—a duty incum- bent on any patriot with a seemly respect for his constitution and his flag—which is to per- form, as one coon observes in tones of modest pride, 'a simple, classic lynching according to the American tradition.' The path of duty seldom runs quite smooth; but, borrowing forty cents for gasoline from their prospective vic- tim—a negro as slow-witted, servile and co- operative as white lyncher's heart could wish —these two set about overcoming obstacles which would have seemed insuperable to a less dauntless pair.

Not least among the many charms of this production is the casual relationship established with the audience, of whom our heroes take a dim but on the whole an amiable view. Par- ticularly fine is the moment when one coon, stricken with pangs of conscience, wonders un- easily whether the audience might not dislike —might protest, might even positively rise up and prevent—a lynching taking place before their eyes. Whereupon his colleague, who is by no means as dumb as he might seem, shrugs one shoulder and promptly puts the question: an irascible negro, rising from the stalls, sub- sides again in some confusion, while another, so inflamed with rage that he mounts the stage,

beats a swift and even more ignominious re- treat. The whole manoeuvre makes an admir-

ably neat, laconic parable on the difference between active and passive roles in any spec- tacle, whether real or make-believe: a parable rather more disturbing, because so much more accurate, than the spurious antics which gener- ally pass for audience participation in this kind of tract.

Much the same intelligence is implicit in Mr McIver's treatment of his lynchers and their victim. For, if your innocent sufferers mooch about—as -Mr Weiss's Angolans do— intoning their wrongs with expressionsat once self-righteous and aggrieved, the audience is not only perfectly unmoved, but liable to re- flect that these tiresome numskulls deserve everything they get. Playwrights ignore this

sound reaction at their peril: Mr McIver both recognises and exploits it, and the result is a

production at once entertaining and immensely reassuring—reassuring in the sense that the play accepts, for once, the complex and pain- ful nature of its subject-matter, and deploys it with an expertise which is neither self- indulgent, portentous nor naïve. And so to the new and bold Theatre 69 Company' of Manchester, who visited the

capital for the first time last week; but their version of She Stoops to Conquer makes a sad companion to James Grout's captivating pro- duction of the same play for the Oxford Play- house in 1967. Tom Courtenay is dismally crabbed as Marlow and the direction through- out is maladroit in the extreme. Still, Juliet Mills's Kate and Trevor Peacock's hectic, flushed, villainously low-browed Tony Lump- kin are undeniably appealing, and there is a touch of brilliance in the coach and horses madly pounding round the auditorium on the way to the horse pond in the last act.