THEATRE
Unnatural causes
Kenneth Hurren
Vanessa Redgrave, whom you may have thought had succumbed forever to the lure of the moving pictures, is back on the boards (to stretch a point) at the Young Vic in a play by Robert Shaw called Cato Street. Miss Redgrave plays the central role in it; she co-presents it (with Mr Shaw and the impresario, Michael White, who may have dreamed dreams of taking it into a West End house); and she also, it would seem, in the absence of any other suitable volunteer, wound up directing it. It is, you may be sure, a play after her own passionately protesting heart. It is nearly all her dearest causes rolled into one. I may even be doing her author an injustice if I upbraid him for thoughtlessly omitting a plea for nuclear disarmament, for that may well have been left on the cutting-room floor in the late stages of taking eighty minutes or so out of an original playing time of four hours.
You assume, innocently, that I must be joking. The play ostensibly deals with the Cato Street conspiracy of 1820 in which a hopeful band of militant radicals planned to assassinate the Cabinet and set up a people's government at the Mansion House, and what could nuclear disarmament have to do with any of that? What indeed? Mr Shaw, I'm sorry to say, is hardly at all concerned with tiresome historical facts. Apart from a brutally picturesque portrayal of the Peterloo Massacre, we learn little of the background to the abortive revolt and are vouchsafed only comic-strip glimpses of the desperate causes of unrest that led to Lord Sidmouth's notoriously repressive legislation. All is subordinated to an attempt to ingratiate the work with latterday radicals who are toiling in sensationally different vineyards.
Women's Lib? Two of the hanged conspirators, including the ringleader, have undergone a blithe and arbitrary sexchange. Black Power and Racial Equality? Cued by a questionable report that one of the conspirators was a mulatto, Mr Shaw has a Jamaican as the leader's chief and voluble lieutenant and also, for good Measure, her lover. Gay Lib? Yes, my dears, another of them is a bit of a fruit crumble, disdained by the aristocracy but accepted by the tolerant proles who are also equipped with such right-minded sentiments as It's not violence we need, it's votes! " Guess where the prime minister goes to escape the hurly-burly of London? If you didn't guess ' Broadstairs,' I'm afraid I haven't quite given you the measure of W.Ir Shaw. He cheerfully allows his women's libber to anticipate Lincoln's "of the People, by the people, for the people" by forty-odd years; verbal anachronisms are as plentiful as four-letter words; and there Was a moment, even, when I felt we were being asked to equate the official attitude to Thomas Paine with the prosecution of the Schoolkids' Oz.
It is possible that all this strikes you as rather jolly, high-spirited fun, but Mr Shaw is in no such jocular mood. Most of the time is spent in bludgeoningly purposeful political discussion of a kind that even the late Brecht might have regarded as Inordinately one-sided and long-winded. The performers (earnestly led by Miss Redgrave, and notably including Bob
Hoskins, George Innes and Norman Beaton) go about their work lustily, but no dramatic sparks fly upwards from their battered anvils. I do not mean either to scorn the fervour or to impugn the causes of Miss Redgrave or Mr Shaw; but for their witless trivialisation of a terrible and lamentable chapter of our social and political history, I think perhaps they ought to be shot.
Robert Shaw, in his actor's hat, was to have been found about a dozen years ago under Lindsay Anderson's mettlesome direction in Willis Hall's play The Long and the Short and the Tall, at the Royal Court. It will be taken, I suppose, as evidence of the reactionary stance of which I am so often so absurdly accused that I regard that old play — now quite excellently revived at the Shaw Theatre by the Dolphin Theatre Company — as superior not only to Mr Shaw's writing effort at the Young Vic, but also to the play under Mr Anderson's direction at the Royal Court.
This latter is The Changing Room by David Storey (and never have I been less likely to forget the ' e ' in his name), a work in which nothing, in any recognisably dramatic sense, happens. (Looked at in the right way, this is not a disappointment, for Storey raises no hope at any time that anything ever will.) It is set, one Saturday afternoon, in the dressing-room of a rugby league club where the players are seen arriving for the match, getting into their playing togs,'coming in bruised and muddy at half-tiine, and getting dressed after wards and going home — except for one who is injured and who goes to hospital instead. Doubtless only an innate perversity decided Storey against calling it The Unchanging Room.
It is the same perversity that led him to call the rival teams ' United' and 'City,' when he knows (if I know, he knows) that such suffixes belong to a different game: rugby league teams tend to have wildly imaginative and evocative names like ' Hunslet ' and ' Widnes ' (they say there are also towns with such names, but I cherish the belief that the teams were there first). This rather sabotages the theory that Storey's purpose is informative, that he set out to write a documentary. He seems not to care about interesting anyone in the sport or even in this ' UnitedCity' match, the result of which is of no consequence. His characters, I have no doubt, are accurately observed; he gives them (with the aid of Mr Anderson and all his devoted actors) the tang of authenticity, an achievement that would seem to have exhausted his inventiveness. There must be at least the suspicion, though, that he is essaying a canny refinement of his craft. Ibsen you will recall had a related idea in that he often began a play with a situation that earlier dramatists would have seen as an ending; Storey ends his where others would think it right to begin. If he should plead that every trade is entitled to its labour-saving devices, how shall he be answered? And don't all speak at once.
Previous page
