REVIEW OF THE ARTS
Kenneth Hurren half persuaded at Stratford
Henry V by William Shakespeare; Royal Shakespeare Company (Stratford-upon-Avon) A Family and a Fortune by Julien Mitchell, from the novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett (Apollo) Alphabetical Order by Michael Frayn (May Fair) Harvey by Mary Chase (Prince of Wales) Nothing actually surprises me at Stratford these days, but I don't mind telling you that the sight of the stage and what was afoot on it, as I entered the Royal Shakespeare Theatre for the opening of the new season there last week, sent my spirits right into my socks. A dozen actors, recognisably among those who were about to perform Henry V, were up there clad in tracksuits and sneakers and the like, strolling or lounging or exercising as the fancy took them on a ramped stage, bare to its whitewashed back wall.
It looked very much, I'm afraid, as though Miss Helen Mirren had had her way with the management (you will recall that she was all complaints last season about the profligate expenditure on scenery and costumes that may well please the audience but really they just get in the actors' way); or else that the company was making a frivolously unsubtle appeal for a larger Arts Council hand-out. I'm not sure that there isn't something in the latter explanation (if not in the former, for the costumes do turn up later), although it is possible to regard these capers as some sort of alienation effect, tenuously ' justified by the text. Chorus appears in contemporary dress legitimately enough, and perhaps the indulgence can initially be extended to the company as a whole; but the device is carried to inordinate lengths and is not abandoned until the third scene„ Thereafter, Terry Hands's production is considerably more satisfactory than most things they have been getting up to at Stratford in recent seasons. Given that they are always keener to impose their own meanings upon a play than to seek out Shakespeare's, and that it would be plainly naive to expect them to take very seriously the fulsome chauvinism of the work, an astonishing amount of pure Shakespeare actually survives. I was but half persuaded of the validity of Alan Howard's thoughtful interpretation of the king, though it has
its own consistency: I missed the ringing, exhortatory fervour of the Crispin's Day speech before Agincourt (Howard delivers it piecemeal casually and chattily), but I suppose that sort of thing would have come ill from a leader who seems just a touch surprised that God really is on his side, rather depressed that he had to order the killing of all prisoners, and doesn't even noticeably crow about those remarkable casualty figures — twenty-nine dead on the English side, ten thousand on the French.
It is in no sense a stirring performance, but it is a reading of which I may come to be more appreciative after I have seen its formative period in the two parts of Henry IV, which will eventually join the present play in the season's repertory. For the moment, though, my compliments go principally to the designer, Farrah, whose contribution to the proceedings is so unreasonably delayed; to Ludmila Mikael, for the most enchantingly persuasive Princess of France 1 have yet encountered (as might, however, be expected of an actress borrowed especially from the Comedie Fran caise); and to a young actor, new to the company and to me, named Peter Bourke, whose performance as the Boy gains from the excitement that the appearance of such a promising new talent always generates. Some estimable and well estabished talents — among them those of Alec Guinness, Margaret Leighton and Rachel Kempson — are on hand to give style if not life to the lifestyle of Ivy Compton-Burnett's specimens of the Edwardian middle classes, smoothly corrupted by greed and self-esteem and even a kind of disembodied sex, in Julien Mitchell's adaptation of her novel, A Family and a Fortune. As in the case of his adaptation of another of het novels, A Heritage and its History, ten years ago, Mitchell brings that strangely elevated dialogue to the stage with a punctillious regard for its sardonic ironies and civilised cruelties, but the pleasure it gives is that of a literary exercise gracefully accomplished, rather than that of a dramatisation that engages the emotions. Miss Compton-Burnett's country houses are enclosed and insulated, and her people have no plausible life outside, or indeed anywhere except on the slide immediately under her microscope.
They are oddly, insistently interesting; but I suspect you may have more fun with the personnel of Alphabetical Order, a comedy set in the cuttings and reference library of a provincial newspaper — palpably the sort of establishment where journalists, if caught early enough, can be persuaded that they are being brought to life rather than being buried alive, but a lack of professional interest in any of these matters will not seriously blight your enjoyment. There is relatively little that is esoteric in the comedy, in which Michael Frayn — though a shrewd observer of his chosen locale — is concerned to draw a more general point from the conflict he sets up in the library between the cheerful chaos presided over by the librarian, Lucy, and the brisk, rather chilly efficiency of her keen new assistant.
Even as we take the one to our hearts, we know, of course, that our heads are being edged towards a wry recognition that the other is the lifeline to survival. It is all dashingly directed by Michael Rudman, who has gathered about him an excellent cast, most notably Billie Whitelaw and Barbara Ferris as the rival spokeswomen for clutter and tidiness, and Dinsdale Landen as a leader-writer with a qualifying phrase built in to every sentence and whose emotional life is plainly as uncommitted as his editorials.
Gathered about James Stewart, the visiting Hollywood celebrity in the revival of Harvey, is a cast of whom only Mona Washbourne and Geoffrey Lumsden afford him acceptable support in this oldfashioned American philosophical farce about an indomitably amiable drunk who is virtually inseparable from a companionable white rabbit called Harvey, over six feet tall but invisible to everyone else. The suggestion of the piece, as 1 got it, is that we should all have a 'Harvey of our very own — not necessarily a big white rabbit or even a small pink elephant, but just anything that makes us feel good and be nice to people. Whimsy of this order tends to bring me out in goose-pimples, but Stewart is irresistibly likeable in spite of everything.
Previous page
