AFTERTHOUGHT
JOHN WELLS
I think it is quite possible that the Roy al Tournament at Earls Court may very soon be- come Outrageously High Camp. It is obviously regarded as that already by the shadowy male frails who flit about in the darkened galleries waiting to wave to the sailors, but for the rest of the adults in the audience it remains a children's entertainment. They sit there among the shrill screaming of the wolf cubs and the uninhibited enthusiasm of their own children bouncing up and down among their knees with terrible expressions of melancholy half-de- tached embarrassment, waiting for it to be over. But by the time the grave beards, experimental theatre lovers and society beauties move in the audience may well find that they are not watch- ing a children's entertainment at all, but a shatteringly dramatic collage of pop that shakes their preconceived ideas about the theatre to the very foundations.
There is one moment about halfway through the show (which seems to me of particular significance) where a Royal Navy Diving and Bomb Disposal Squad are lowered from a rubber canoe suspended just under the roof down into the darkened but ultra-violet-lit arena. The illusion of submarine activity is created in fairly broad strokes with the use of pale green octopuses, orange rays and yellow starfish which all glow with ultra-violet radi- ance in the blackness. The shirts and summer dresses of the audience also glow, so the effect is not without a certain charm. The bomb dis- posal expert is then seen groping his way on the end of a luminous rope across the floor of the arena towards what is described by the commentator as a dangerous unexploded mine. The expert kneels down beside the glowing green drum in the darkness, mimes a few tinkering movements to amplified clanks and bangs on the soundtrack, and then the com- mentator, who sounds exactly like Kenneth Horne, tells us that he has set off the fuse, and that he has only fifteen seconds left. The seconds begin to tick away in the soundtrack.
the "expert mimes further tinkering, and then on the fourteenth second stands back and the ticking stops. Kenneth Home gives a gasp of unbelieving admiration and says, 'He's done it!' and the children break into applause.
Now the importance of this incident, which from a point of view of theatrical impact is one of the weakest in the whole show, is that every one knows it is not a real mine, and yet they are applauding the man's achievement in disarming it. At another stage in the demon- stration the Royal Air Force let off a toy mis- sile, which rockets away up towards the ceiling leaving a trail of sparks and is then picked up on a film screen in colour, seen to converge on an approaching jet bomber, and to explode in a bloom of orange flame. The applause then is for the ingenuity of the spectacle. In the case of the luminous mine the applause is for the drama : the actor and the commentator suc- ceed in convincing the audience that what he is doing is true, even though they know rationally that it is not.
And yet this effect has been achieved with theatrical devices unquestionably less powerful than anything else in the show. The ultra-violet light, used only in this sequence, makes the audience more aware rather than less aware of the simple theatrical apparatus, and despite that they allow themselves to be taken in by the conjuring trick. What we are left with the rest of the time are a series of powerful dynamic images, all of them charged with strong his- torical associations, violent and full of danger, but all entirely abstract, having no ultimate dramatic climax, no story to tell, no hero and no development.
The Royal Nasy field gun competition gives us the brawny lads in the white leggings humping huge pieces of dismantled guns over walls, sliding across wires on pulleys, scrambling over more barriers and then dropping them with a great three-ton thump to assemble them again, form up round the gun and fire three rounds: the movement and the energy are as gripping and exhilarating as the wildest sea-battle in the epic cinema, and yet we are conscious all the time that the rough backcloth at one end of the arena showing a city wall and the distant colonial landscape is only decoration. uncon- fleeted with' what is going on, and that all the involvement of the audience is disciplined into sympathising with one team or the other in a formalised race.
Similarly the spectacle of the massed pipes and drums of the Lowland and Highland Brigades, with the patterns of blue and green and red-black plaids, the spinning white drum- sticks and the flash of silver clasps brings the level of sentimental suspension of disbelief among the audience to such a pitch that any story told against it would be accepted without a flicker of criticism: but there is no story. The gymnastic display hypnotises the eye with the flowering and unfolding of patterns as fifty impersonal and perfectly controlled dummies in red and white roll outwards from the centre and then roll inwards again, others dive across the central platform like streaks of pure white :olour split second after split second, but the spectacle has no meaning beyond the perfec- tion of the discipline. The King's Troop of the Royal Horse Artillery cross and recross the arena, three pairs of horses to each smoothly spinning gun carriage, harnesses jingling and glinting, toy soldiers in plumes and frogged tunics, but never coming to relieve any beleaguered garrison, only creating patterns.
What makes these abstract elements of a spectacular drama even more impressive out of any context is their unselfconscious heritage of ancient pop: drums and trumpets that once stirred the feelings to roaring exhilaration, silencing the reason and sending men out to a hot-blooded death, uniforms like theatrical costumes designed to increase the human stature from a confused reflective individual to a single-minded symbol of aggressive power, the creative rituals that once welded many men into a single weapon, still surviving in a peaceful corner of the napalm and electronic war like the colourful rituals of a forgotten religion or the treasures of a ruined church. I suppose that those who have organised the Tournament could be under the illusion that the show will drive the audience mad enough to enlist in Britain's dwindling divisions. Which is presumably why the sample comes out as such a cavalcade of non-functional and decorative theatrical display.
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