Theatre
No soft option
Giles Gordon
Softcops (RSC: The Pit) A Handful of Pleasant Delights (National: Cottesloe) Where the Wild Things Are (National: Lyttelton) Foolsfire (Riverside) riaryl Churchill's Softcops is certainly an V./antidote to the endless musicals, pan- tomimes and jolly comedies which have been theatrical staple in recent weeks, even months. It's a desperately serious treatise, (and to emphasise that, there's no interval) about crime, punishment and male society. Set in 19th-century France, it features our old, ambiguous friend Vidocq (Geoffrey Freshwater), master-crook turned top cop, and thus Miss Churchill — one of our very best playwrights — can debate as she will whether hierarchical society is responsible for the criminal, or the criminal for forcing society to punish him.
The trouble is that the play is more il- lustrated lecture than drama, though lots of
'dramatic' things happen. A thief is obliged to hold up for the mob to see, his right hand, painted red; then it's cut off. 'It's over very quickly,' says the fastidious and sadistic Minister for, presumably, Justice (John Carlisle). 'I don't count the talking.' In one of the evening's few jokes, a schoolboy, obliged to watch justice being meted out, asks why, if the victim has stolen a leg of lamb, his hand not leg is truncated. Member after member of a chain-gang has rivets banged into hands and feet. And, in a particularly telling scene, an exhausted conspirator reveals to a co-conspirator that he's a police spy. The
co-conspirator confesses likewise, whereupon the first denies his espionage and makes to shoot the second; and so on. Who's guilty of what?
Softcops, which includes half-way through a variety act (Vidocq as conjuror), is constructed almost as a variety bill. It also features Lacenaire (Malcolm Storry), a bungling murderer and petty thief who, like Vidocq, published his ghosted memoirs; and Jeremy Bentham (Pip Miller), who demonstrates his panopticon, a tower (or phallic symbol) from which the few, even one, may keep an eye on the many. The concept, surely, stretches back to Hadrian's Wall and forward to the concentration camp. Throughout, Pierre (Ian Talbot) is earnestly observing and seeking his god- dess, Reason.
Miss Churchill, I suspect unfortunately, read Michel Foucault's Surveiller et Punir
and so impressed was she by Foucault's ideas that they have taken over and devoured the play she might have written. The book, apparently, analyses the way in which we used to brutalise, torture and physically destroy the criminal classes whereas today we merely observe them. If you believe that, it seems to me, you'll believe anything. Yet Miss Churchill is as sophisticated a writer as we have (there's a nice dig at Brecht: because there are no placards, nobody knows what to think), so dexterous with language and argument, that even the horrors, which are given full rein in Howard Davies's symphonic, elo- quent production, disturb rather than mere- ly disgust.
As ironic counterpoint to the action, the Medici String Quartet play Nigel Hess's luscious music, and Bob Crowley has designed another of his operatic sets, a palace that has seen grander days: tapestry, dried flowers, chairs, a step-ladder, dust sheets, guttering candles. It's very much an ensemble production. None of the actors has the chance to give a remarkable characterisation because of the play's fluid, episodic structure. The final effect is of a cross between the Marat/Sade and the more arid Mr Edward Bond.
If anyone could persuade me of the pleasures of fishing, it would be Michael Hordern. In a National Theatre platform performance he reads, memorably, choice extracts from lzaac Walton's The Compleat Angler. The humanity of Sir Michael's art, surely, is that his ruffled, apologetic, mut- tering manner allows him to proselytise on any subject he chooses. Nothing comes as a complete shock to him — he's been around — yet most things still surprise him, and thus us, delightfully. He pronounces the names of fish and flies with passion and pride. He makes Walton's romantic, pur- poseful words, published in 1653, seem freshly minted for the evening's audience, and confidently conveys their essential Englishness.
The other charmer of the week is Glynde- bourne's staging of Oliver Knussen's fan- tasy opera, Where the Wild Things Are, with libretto by Maurice Sendak from his classic children's book. The music, which is none of my business, seems vapid and un- worthy though Karen Beardsley as Max in wolf's clothing sings and acts with enor- mous gusto. Mr Sendak's sets, beautifully realised, are the book precisely and the five enormous, but enormous, monsters plus the smaller goat who hands Max the crown are the most gorgeous creatures. They seem astonished to exist, as if Stonehenge has come alive, an alien age, and their benevolent lives are transformed by the presence of Max. When they roll their yellow eyes, chatter in Yiddish, then fall asleep they're the most cuddly, vulnerable beings imaginable.
I thought I should bite the bullet and see one show from the London International Mime Festival, which runs for four weeks at divers venues. I chose Foolsfire, which brings together three young American jug-
glers, acrobats and clowns. They're rather good, and don't suggest the twee tedium of Marcel Marceau. Bob Berky is funny as a green-clad birdwatcher who, finally, is savaged and driven off by the birds that watch him, created by his hands which flap and peck at his face. Michael Moschen does the most beautiful act with three glass balls, light and a heart-shaped hoop. With Fred Garbo, (who does a winsome, interminable act with a unicycle) the company, dressed as airmen, persuade hand-held inflatable planes to fly through the clouds according to the feelings and moods of the pilots.
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