Theatre
North of Suez
Ted Whitehead
Plenty (Lyttelton)
The sight of David Hare in his early thirties turning into John Osborne leaves me with mixed feelings. It's not entirely unexpected. Teeth 'n' Smiles was a pop allegory about Britain with a concluding dirge, 'Last Orders on the Titanic', that recalled The Entertainer. Knuckle was rich in Osborne echoes, particularly in the denunciations of British hypocrisy and greed, and in the lines, 'I wonder why all the words my generation believed in — words like honour and loyalty — are now just a joke.' Those lines are spoken by a middle-aged woman, but Hare seems to share her disillusion and, perhaps, her nostalgia. His new play, Plenty, is a cry of disgust with Britain — with the wet, the cold, the flu, the food, the loveless English — and with the horror of sexual repression, the futility. of sexual freedom, the corruption of wealth, the lie of good behaviour, the decay of belief, the deceit of advertising, the hell of suburban marriage, the pettiness of life in the corporate bureaucracy and the indignity of death. I think we can say that David Hare has had a bellyful, like Osborne, and again like him he compares the desolate present with a nobler and more herioc past. Here it's a woman, Susan, recalling her work with the Special Operations Executive in occupied France. The action starts in 1943 —when she has an unforgettable meeting with a British agent — and then charts her development through the compromised postwar years. After a period of boredom in a shipping office, she works for the Festival of Britain* and then becomes an agency copywriter (the conventional self-flagellant of left-wIng fiction). By the beginning of the Fifties she has decided that England cannot go nti
being ghastly forever, and so, for eighteen months, she copulates regularly with a Young spiv in the hope of getting pregnant; When this fails, he presses his claims and she Shoots him. He's bribed back to health and Silence by a friendly diplomat, whom she then marries for his kindness. She attacks his boss over Suez, humiliates his guests, and becomes so infuriated with the silken hypocrisies of the diplomatic service that She damages his career. He resigns and takes up a monotonous insurance job (another convention) and, times being hard, plans to sell the house, which she Promptly donates to a regiment of battered Wives. She takes to the road, meets the unforgettable agent for a night in a cheap hotel in Blackpool, and slips into a drugged Sleep after dedicating the room to their Comrades who fell in battle almost twenty Years earlier.
Susan, the destroyed (self-destroyed) idealist, is compared with a younger friend,, Alice, who tries her hand at writing, then Painting, then teaching, and ends up in social service, shepherding the battered wives. She's evidently a bit more liberated than Susan — she'd have to be, rattling on in 1947 about masturbation and the correct employment of the clitoris — but hardly More fulfilled. Unfortunately this womenagainst-the-world alliance is unconvincing because Alice remains a blank (with Julie Covington under-employed) while Susan (the mannered Kate Nelligan) seems from the beginning to be enduring some private nightmare that prevents her from relating to anybody else at all; in refusing to glamorise
her, the author has so emphasised her strident egocentricity that he cuts the ground from under her feet. He also gives both the
siPiv (David Schofield) and the husband (Stephen Moore) opportunities for explicit
attacks on her cruelty and unkindness. (It's as if he were with the women in principle and the men in practice.) Yet the final scene, an ironic coda set back in 1944 with Susan celebrating the dawn of a new, approved world, firmly reminds us of the social ambitions of the play.
The cinematic construction, in twelve scenes that keep the action hurtling forward, or backward and forward, gives a feeling of hectic development that never quite ?eeomes organic growth; and the feeling is intensified by the inclusion of some sketchy Minor characters, such as the schoolgirl who wants an abortion and a Burmese couple Who might have stepped in from a television series about our Asian friends. Watching it come down, I felt as confused as the play itself is. It may mean more to those for whom Suez still rings a bell. But what bell? The play expresses a disenchantment with a post-imperial England Which itself seems historically remote. The Period is '43 to '62 but it's crammed with Prochronisms, not only in the language, but lit: the casual references to sex, drugs and atte red wives. This would be no more than a quibble if 1962 had not also been the year flint introduced the Pill, the Beatles and an
era of populist culture and radical politics that differs profoundly from the preceding era.
In his last play, Fanshen, David Hare described how the process of land reform in China turned over, i.e. changed, men's souls as well as their bodies. Plenty condemns the English for refusing to turn over and for evidently preferring materialism and a hierarchical order. Unfortunately it skips the political analysis that might explain that preference, and is reduced to railing against the nation's stupidity and celebrating its own intelligence — rather as Osborne, in his recent acrid elegies, has been reduced to celebrating 'the Word'.
The writer in West of Suez described himself as 'just an old radical who detests progress'. Too early to say that of Hare, but beneath the glacially witty dialogue of his play is a dangerous nostalgia and deep sense of exhaustion, with a patrician-romantic distaste that is thoroughly English in tone. The National production is extremely sumptuous. What better place to hurl subsidised abuse at the ruling class?
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