Theatre
Revolting peasants
Kenneth Hurren
The Great Society by Beverley Cross, with Geoffrey Whitehead, Peter Postlethwaite, Bernard Miles (Mermaid, London) Living Together by Alan Ayckbourn. with Tom Courtenay (Greenwich Theatre) I shall have to restrain myself from writing about that Alan Ayckbourn trilogy at Greenwich for another couple of weeks, until I've seen all three of these comedies written about the same people in the same situation and, of course, with the same outcome. It is a remarkable triplication in which each play, though existing independently in itself, in some way complements its fellows. While the success of the enterprise as a whole cannot yet be judged, I am recklessly confident of it already: Living Together is quite as amusing as the first piece, Table Manners, and if you're handy to Greenwich it might be wise to get in the queue for all three, which will be playing in repertory all through June. The general title of the trilogy, by the way, is The Norman Conquests, and you will be relieved to know that it has to do with a man named Norman and his success with women, and nothing at all to do with mediaeval history. I mention this in case you've been within boring distance of the Mermaid show, The Great Society, which is, I'm afraid, about mediaeval history; towards which I have developed, of a sudden, a ferocious antipathy, at least in its theatrical manifestations. Beverley Cross's piece has to do with the Peasants Revolt of 1381, an event recalled in flashback by Richard II as he is about to be assassinated in 1400, and the tendentious case advanced is that the killer, Piers Exton, was chiefly motivated by revenge for Richard's betrayal of the cause of Wat Tyler and the peasants when the king was a lad of fourteen.
This is not to take a liberty that in itself is likely to cause much offence at this remove (I daresay, indeed, that it's just the sort of conjectural bone that the more frolicsome historians delight to pick at, and their donnish little games do no great harm, bless them), but dramatically it serves no especially arresting purpose and it's hard to say why Cross brought the subject up. The most plausible theory that occurs to me is that he's a pretty hard-line feudalist with very little real sympathy for the downtrodden rabble. Here they are, nursing for twenty years their rotten grievance against this well-meaning fourteen-year-old; depicted generally as crude brutes, relishing rape and decapitation; and led by a man less inspired by an urgent social cause than merely steamed up over the gruesome fate of his daughter at the hands of the nobility. With discouraging weights of that order flung into the scale against it, the Revolt probably wouldn't grab much of your sympathy even if Cross had taken a closer look at the injustices of the system that provoked it, rather than boiling the whole thing down to the poll tax. It isn't often these days that a dramatist seeking acclaim in a subsidised theatre would take a stern line even against workers striking for a living wage of 00 a week, let alone against these poor fourteenth-century devils rubbing along on a quid or two a year, and the novelty of it is engaging. The play isn't, however, and anyway I may easily have misunderstood Cross's sentiments, for he is a tedious writer, and my interest in his play was fitful at best. The acting is dull and declamatory; everybody wears grey and looks miserable, as well they might with all their banal little homilies and flat slabs of blank prose which I cannot forbear calling Cross-talk.
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