Theatr e

Infernal Intimacy

By ALAN BRIEN

Marie Bell Com pagnie. (Savoy.)

WHEN I turned to page 25 of the Sunday Times last weekend for my regular sab- batical chuckle over Mr. Harold Hobson, the Robert Hirsch of dramatic critics, C I V my heart sank. There in front of me reared the slip- pery precipitous sentence `anyone who knows

Racine's turbulent relations

with Port Royal and what "le grand Arnauld" thought of the play, and Racine's discomfiture rw,fien he saw the orgiastic display of lust that "nanipmesle made of Phedre, will incline to the view that the point he wished to emphasise . . After three attempts to scale it, I gave up and turned to the Observer. This was almost equally

dispiriting. Mr. Alan Pryce-J ones beg feudal an with a eudal edict—'Before going to the Racine season

now presented at the Savoy Theatre, take a train to Cardiff. There you will find in the National Museum an exhibition entitled Classical and ideal Landscape . . I regret to say that 1 have not followed the sign m .is erected by these two distinguished explorers. The language of Racine, those outbursts of anguish sliced into epigrams with a hunk of raw emotion sandwiched between- two rhymes, has not always been unreservedly admired, even in ranee. Stendhal had a point when he corn- °lamed that the alexandrine `dit toujours trop 011 Peu trop et qui sans cesse recule devant le mot Propre.' The famous incandescent lines, so boosted by Agate, do not always seem to burn so much more brightly in lonely clusters than those

of Webster, or even Dryden. But Racine is

11. °t the poet of the individual red-hot image. He is Celebrating high mass on a stage which has eccmle an altar. His approach is aristocratic, formal, ceremonial (as he said himself—`The french language avoids with extreme dislike descending to details because its cars are delicate and cannot bear that common things like an awl, a_.saw or an auger should be named in a serious discussion). This is the viewpoint of a high priest

who sees Catholicism, Absolute Monarchy and Classicism as the triple pillar of his cathedral— T. S. Eliot at the court of Louis XIV. It tends to arouse the roundhead and the radical, the protes- tant and the romantic, in those of us who are brought up in the tradition of Shakespeare.

But I find these plays impressive by their very monumental perversity. They are isolated not only from awls and augers but equally from daggers and poisons. Even death and lust are abstractions in these caves of ice. No one ever pokes the fire or carves a joint or makes a bed in this frosty underworld. The characters live in a continual state of infernal intimacy without ever removing their masks. It is not accidental that incest is the basic theme of all Racine. Here is the maximum of temptation co-existing at absolute zero with the minimum of satisfaction. And the logical result of incest is cannibalism— each woman eats the thing she loves, each man hates the thing he eats. There is no sympathy, no pity, no affection. Just a kind of inhuman suicidal boredom such as might possess a tank of ancient crocodiles. Phedre is the concentrated essence of Racine and a symbol for hell far more powerful than Sartre's Huis C/os.

It was Giraudoux who pointed out that Racine had no childhood at Port Royal (In view of the singular and vehement personages who sur- rounded him it is astonishing that one of them could be found to teach him to walk'). And he argues that the peculiar effect of Racine's plays lies in the fact that the classical world was more real to him than his own. Yet it is their unreality which hypnotises us. Men without blood in their veins who cry out for slaughter. Women without sex who suffer for love. Much is heard about the mathematics of Racine's construction—the Euclid of the passions. But none of his problems is ever solved. Indeed, no problem is ever really posed. Destruction is the only denouement.

Such plays present enormous problems in staging for a modern audience. I believe that it is the task of the theatre to bring drama to us, not for us to dress up in pantaloons and, warmed up by a Linguaphone record, pretend to be Louis XIV. In Phedre, Mile Marie Bell appears to be presenting the play in the traditional style where every gesture and intonation comes to us patinaed with the authority of the ages. And it is exhilarat- ing at first to see actors who have such confidence in a classic, who speak their verse with speed, clarity and conviction. Few of our Shakespearian stars betray such trust in the playwright who has provided them with their knighthoods.

But Mlle Bell and her company tend eventually to rely too much on the lasting effect of the awe implicit in the name Racine—at least in Phedre. Mlle Bell is not a person but the epitome of half- diabolical, half-divine obsessions, inflated to Cineramic scale. It is not at all essential that she should embody the sort of personal lusts and lecheries which end up at the Old Bailey but un- fortunately her Phedre is stuck somewhere be- tween the realistic and the legendary. The revela- tion of her passion for her young stepson is paced out by Racine in long speeches. The naming of the nameless passion is not the climax (despite Mr. Alan Pryce-Jones)—the tragic result lies in her willingness to lie about it. Though the couplets race along, and are spoken with indig- nant speed, yet the reactions of the characters move at the pulse-speed of lantern slides. Marie Bell appears looking like a henna-dyed, gin- logged concierge on the verge of heart failure. Up that central corridor, she rattles her old bones wrapped in bargain-basement blankets, with her ginger top-knot bobbing and her eye-balls skid- ding like marbles. Racine intends her to be illicit desire feeding on its own sweat—instead the tradition has now become such an anachronism that we can see only Lillian Gish with a series of expressions too big for her face keeping time with the camera set-ups.' Her voice shatters ear- drums and makes jock-straps jump. She is un- of subtle but complex. repetitive but devastating' fu obvious but unforgettable. Her supporters, Why[hi in varying degrees lack her piety, tend to nii01 th , lob I this almost-comical sublimity. Instead tneY It.

various envies of embarrassment. id Brittunicus, I understand, is t e in a new PO' ai duction. Certainly there seems to be some SOT it of tension between the hieratic, larger-than-lifr size, telescopic performance .of Mlle Bell as Agrippine, the mother of Ndron, and Robert Hirsch as Ndron himself, the holy, shifty. deadly ; it fly-boy and boy fly—the microscopic contamina' v for who spreads his disease by cosy rapes and chummy murders. M. Hirsch, whom I admired ) n so much as the limp fornicator facing the deeper' ate nymphomaniac in Le Dindon last year, plays him for Shakespearian realism. The hypochto t driac twitch, the pansy flounce, the spoilt-brat giggle, the killer's kindheartedness were all woven in and out of lines which gave only the faintest hints of such endearing humanity. Marie Bell as Agrippine is not the same as Phedre—she has shed twenty years and the burden of geronit' I philiac sexiness. But now she is Queen Victoria under the influence of Oscar Wilde--a ageless matron in a gold-leafed housecoat and 3 transparent nightgown who believes the flattetY of her Prime Ministers. Moment to long moment she cannot be faulted, but she is not in the same play as M. Hirsch. He is recreating Ndron bril- liantly in the image of the modern audience. She is performing a miracle of re-incarnation Iron' the past. Few characters of Racine ever make contact or converse, but the remote possibilitY of connection is always over the horizon. Mlle Bell and M. Hirsch pass through each other like ghosts who are fated never to meet.