Theatre
Shaxberdian
By BAMBER GASCOIGNE
Measure for Measure. (Strat- ford - upon - Avon.) — The School for Scandal. (Hay- market.)—Two Stars for Comfort. (Garrick.) ON the face of it Shaxberd, who is spelt that way in the earliest known reference to the play, is using in Measure for Measure a rather tumbledown old plot merely as a framework for a discussion of ideas. The plot brings in an idealistic virgin, a bawd, a lusty pimp, a trim- ming courtiers a debauched puritan, a young man condemned to death for making love to the girl he loves, and a detached intelligence in the person of the clandestine Duke. Each of these characters can hold forth in his own perspective on the subjects of life and death, love and lust, law and true justice, the nature of mercy or the dissembling face of virtue. The great set speeches become the object of the play, and we brush aside the inexplicable cruelties of the Duke, the priggishness of Isabella and the undramatic quality of the last act as unimportant.
Given this interpretation—and I think it may well be the right one—John Blatchley's produc- tion, which opens the season at Stratford, is superb. In front of the great rough stone wall of John Bury's set the actors wear rich clothes of simple but subtle tones; in neat unfussy group- ings they deliver their scenes with the crisp clarity which a drama of ideas demands. The performances range, with the parts, through the full spectrum from prim to bawdy; but they never, as in so many Shaxberdian productions, seem to split into the two separate worlds of prince and oaf, tragedy and comedy, verse and prose. In this Measure for Measure everyone is manifestly part of the same fascinating discus- sion, and the mood is such that it is inconceiv- able that anyone will finally be allowed to die. The one exception, perhaps, is Marius Goring's Angelo, who is apt to suggest inner disturbance by slumping to the ground.
The higher interpretation of Measure for Measure, put forward primarily by Wilson Knight, makes the play even more cerebral, and holds that far from being haphazard every twist of the plot is part of a carefully devised Morality in which Shaxberd is as critical of Isabella's false pride (Wore than our brother is our chastity') as of Angelo's false virtue; both lack humanity. By this token every character is accorded an exact place in a scale of ethical merit, the forthright pimp coming high on the list and. the Duke, a Christ-figure, coming out top. There are flaws in this theory—at the very end, for example, when Isabella has at last achieved tolerance, she suddenly improvises an absurdly amoral argument to prove Angelo, once more, less guilty than her brother—but after seeing this excellent production of John Blatch- ley's it would be interesting to see one which goes one stage further into abstraction and didactic clarity, even perhaps giving the characters masks to 'demonstrate' their places in the Morality. Cymbeline, another comedy of being and seeming, might benefit too from this approach. 1 am not suggesting that the way to produce this vein of Shaxberd is Brechtian. There is no one way. But it might be revealing.
The way to produce Sheridan is not in doubt, and the occasional deviations from it in Sir John Gielgud's The School for Scandal seem un- intentional. On the whole the production is successful. Against magnificent sets by Anthony Powell (never have I seen such 'beguiling trompe-T'a'il as in these backcloths) Margaret Rutherford's Mrs. Candour gobbles out her scandal with huge relish, like something between a gigantic turkey and Tenniel's drawing of the Duchess; Meriel Forbes too, as Lady Sneerwell, successfully projects the attraction of witty in- sincerity, but Anna Massey plays Lady Teazle's defects so literally that she makes the character too single-mindedly repulsive. Dan Massey's Charles Surface leads the male revels with rakish charm; Ralph Richardson, though very awkward in Sir Peter Teazle's early soliloquy, comes into his own when he has the 'wits' to grumble amongst; John Neville is an elegant Joseph Surface but makes nothing of the comedy in the man's hypocritical gobbets of ethical philosophy—or, in eighteenth-century parlance, his 'sentiments.'
John Mortimer's recent plays have been spoilt, for me, by a lack of seriousness—he has been unable to resist a joke or an archly comic turn of phrase, regardless of its irrelevance to situa- tion or character. With Two Stars for Comfort this failing has vanished. Mortimer has created, in a timbered seaside pub festooned with fairy lights, a satisfactory image for a world of escapism. The publican, Sam Turner, is an irresponsible charmer who pretends to have eternal youth and who annually seduces the Regatta Queen while his wife withdraws to Ruislip. He is an ageing impresario of jollity. One sees him full of smiling vitality while he urges someone to sing a song; he then lapses unconsciously into weariness during the verse and revives only just in time to rally everyone into joining in the chorus. Trevor Howard, re- turning to the stage after eight years, plays him immaculately.
The comfort which this man gives to the clients of his pub is to bolster up the illusions by which they live. They are all, himself included, pathetic; but this would have been a very bad play if Mortimer had treated them with pathos. He hasn't, and his play is an effectively astringent attack on sentimental make-believe—though, somewhat alarmingly, the matinee audience with which I saw it seemed not to notice this fact. One of the most telling moments involves a middle- aged tough whose annual illusion is that he is going to win the Golden Sculls in the regatta. This year his heart gives out even before he reaches the start. Within moments Mortimer has him back in the pub, fat, red, sweaty, in ridiculous White shorts and vest, being com- forted by a young girl who puts her arms round him and says never mind, there's always next year.
If anything the play's chief fault comes from taking the astringency too far. A group of students, for whom the youthful and irrespons- ible spirit of the pub is still natural, perform a play of their own about Sam Turner's love life. Mortimer presumably intends it to be insensi- tively cruel (Turner even now still smiles and laughs) but be has written it in such a way that it is grotesquely and unconvincingly savage. He thus lets his play's harsh centre erupt with exaggerated violence, which is a pity because, until then, its chief merit has been the subtlety with which it has implied the worm within these overblown roses.
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