Theatre
Bristol Fashion
By BANIBER GASCOIGNE
rilE. idea of a historical drama written in 1863 is decidedly gloomy, and there are people who would approach a history play written in 1963 with equal distrust. Personally I disagree
with the second half of the proposition and be- lieve that in the tough anti-romantic theatre of the twentieth century historical drama is one of the most exciting vehicles available to a dramatist. The fault lay not with historical drama itself, but with what the Victorians understood by it. The heavy mock-Shakespearean poeticism of Tennysods plays formed the prevailing image of historical drama and blighted it for decades. In his Harold (of Hastings fame), the hero enters gamely with the words: Hail, Gamel, son of Orm!
Albeit no rolling stone, my good friend Gamel, Thou hast rounded since we met.
In these plays the romanticism of the history, the setting and the language was used as a sub- stitute for theme, drama and character. The plays were not about anything. They were historical pageants, made out of cotton wool and liberally daubed with gold and silver paint.
Plays like Saint Joan, Galileo and Luther have smashed this image of historical drama. Written in prose, terse, intelligent, modern in their mood and language, such plays have a strong central theme which is directly relevant to their authors' own life and age. The history is a servant to this theme. John Osborne writes about Luther be- cause he sees in Luther's struggle with the smooth hierarchy and paternalism of the Catholic Church a mirror of his own frustration when confronted with the English Establishment. So the violently subjective outbursts of Jimmy Porter are general- ised, turned into a parable—which is what nearly all serious drama had always been, until the arrival of Naturalism in the last century. What we lose of Jimmy Porter's vitality, we gain in Luther's breadth and calm.
The play of 1863 which started this train of thought is lbsen's The Pretenders, now being given a centenary production by the Bristol Old Vic. With relief one discovers that its flavour is far more modern than Tennysonian. First of all it's in prose—rare for a historical drama of time and even rare for Ibsen at that period, since the play immediately before it, Love's Comedy, and the two famous ones which follow it, Brand and Peer Gynt, are all in verse. More important, the history is made to carry a theme which was very personal to Ibsen at the time. In the summer of 1863 he went to the Bergen festival with Bjornstjerne Bjornson, an ebulliently confident author who was five years younger than Ibsen, but already far more successful, having been accepted as the spokesman. of the new genera- tion. By contrast, Ibsen had just spent six un- successful years working in the theatre in Christiania. At times he felt something of Bjornson's bubbling self-confidence,. but more often he was undermined by doubt and despair. The contrast between them is precisely the con- trast between the protagonists of The Pretenders.
Norway in the thirteenth century was split between two claimants to the throne : the young Haakon Haakonson, who would have had an undisputed claim were there not doubts about his legitimacy; and his uncle, Skule Baardsson, whose claim was weaker but more established and who had an equally strong following. The theme of the play is confidence and the almost miraculous power that it can give, against all the odds. Haakon has this quality of confidence. His very first words in the play, when he is urged to pray to God, are, 'There's no need. I'm sure of Him.' Earl Skule, on the other hand, is worse than a doubter; he is described as a man who even 'doubts his own doubt.' He veers through the play on a manic-depressive pattern, plunging from spurts of activity to deep and paralysing despair. He tries to appropriate Haakon's ideal of unifying Norway and to achieve it himself (the ideal is frequently referred to as Haakon's child, whereas Skule is barren—many of Ibsen's later methods are here in embryo), but after causing a chain of disasters Skule finally decides to sacrifice himself so as to leave Haakon free to fulfil the ideal. His suicide is his only suc- cessful and positive action.
Val May's direction is on the whole excellent, though l could have done with fewer coloured lights playing on stone pillars. He achieves his most magnificent effect when Skule is at the peak of his confidence, having just discovered that he has, after all, a son of his own. Val May brings him on at the very back of the stage on a huge towering white figure of a horse, sur- rounded, it seems, by a mob of pedestrian pigmies. John Phillips is better in Skule's pensive moods than in his passion, but Monica Evans is superbly moving as his daughter Margaret. David Sumner gives an efficiently boyish per- formance as Haakon, and John Bennett rasps and slimes splendidly as Bishop Nicholas, the wicked prelate who sets the parties off against each other, but who dies, all too soon, in panic and yelling for more and lustier priests to sing masses for his soul, in the middle act of the play. Altogether this is an excellent start to the Bristol Old Vic's admirably ambitious season. It will be followed in the next four months by a Shakespeare, a Sheridan, and premieres in this country of a Dfirrenmatt, an Anouilh and a Priestley adaptation of Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head.
The early part of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is superbly drama- tised in Hugh Leonard's Stephen D by the simple device of having Stephen Dedalus in his twenties at the side of the stage narrating his boyhood thoughts while a small boy sits silent and wide- eyed in the various scenes, staring with amaze- ment at the brutality in his school, at the priest slogging his way through the sermon on hell fire, at the mysterious squabbles in his family about Parnell and Kitty O'Shea and the treachery of the Catholic Church. Hugh Leonard, using only Joyce's words, has spliced his chosen snippets together with great skill and the theatrical effect is superb. The later part of the boot, following Stephen as an undergraduate, has fewer set scenes. More pages are taken up with the doubts, fears, protests and lusts raging in his mind and I found that these, understandably, transferred less well to the stage. Norman Rodway gives a humorous and sturdy performance as Stephen, though physically, looking broad and tough enough to command respect in any rugger scrum, he is a long way from one's idea of Joyce.
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