CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
Venice Preserv'd. By Thomas Otway. (Lyric, Hammersmith.)— Britannicus. By Jean Racine. Le Jeu de L'Amour et du Hasard. By Pierre de Marivaux. On ne Saurait Penser a Tout. By Alfred de Musset. (Comedie Francaise : St. James's.) The Seven Year Itch. By George Axelrod. (Aldwych.)—The Two.
Bouquets. By Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon. (St. Martin's.)
OTWAY'S tragedy merits revival, and Peter Brook's production at Hammersmith does it justice. The presence in London of a company from the Comedie Francaise gives the revival an added interest, for the French' classical influence worked strongly on Otway, and in this, his best play, one can glimpse what he might have founded ; a generally acceptable form and style for tragedy on the grand and classically-proportioned scale. The play has blemishes enough in construction and characterisation to prevent its regaining the immense popularity it enjoyed throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, and there is no doubt that much of its more obvious artificiality helps to hold a modern audience at arm's length. But is that necessarily a bad thing ? It is, at any rate, superbly actable and quick with the authentic theatrical thrill, and one likes to think or Shakespeare and Racine watching it from opposite corners.
As Jaffeir, the noble Venetian who joins a conspiracy against the Senate and then betrays it at the promptings of his wife, Mr. Gielgud crosses Hamlet and Brutus in a subdued performance which is all the more telling for its remarkable unselfishness. The weakness. of the part lies chiefly in the ease by which Belvidera can strike sickness into Jaffeir's conscience, but Mr. Gielgud supplies what the lines lack and almost persuades one that the inward conflict is deep-seated enough to qualify for tragic nobility. Paul Scofield as Pierre is Cassius to the Brutus aspect bf Jaffeir, brazen-voiced, conscience- free, a perfect contrast. The best scenes in the play are between these two, from the nocturnal meeting on the Rialto, when Pierre persuades Jaffeir to join the plot, to the moment in the torture-chamber when Jaffeir stabg Pierre to save him• from a horrible and shameful death on the wheel. The Me of Belvidera lacks substance, and the tran- sitions which it demands, from sweet wifeliness into the very em- bodiment of outraged conscience and thence into remorse and mad- ness and death, are painfully abrupt. Eileen Herlie has a noble presence ; it is a part for her, certainly ; and she plays it nobly enough ; yet there is something colourless about her performance, a paleness which is curiously at odds with the volume of sound that pours from her mouth during the mad scene. But the pallor is in the part, no doubt, rather than in Miss Herlie. There is nothing pale about Pamela Brown's Aquilina, the courtesan who lows Pierre but endures for a consideration the palsied caresses of the aged senator Antonio, played with a rare shivering gusto by Richard Wordsworth. Their scenes together are the scurrilous comic relief to the thickening gloom elsewhere, and there is one which plays like an outrageous dramatisation of one of those intimate episodes chronicled in the Sunday newspapers. Mr. Brook's production takes its calm unruffled course against Mr. Hurry's fine settings, and when the evening is over one feels again that deep sense of gratitude for the existence of John Gielgud not only as our finest actor but as one who takes as much care for his company as he does for his own performance. Admiration for such a' man should be unlimited. .
Jean Marais' production of Britannicus graced the stage of the St. James's last week. Rich drapings plunged from an immense height, and a statue stretched its superhuman gesture across the players beneath, whose splendid costumes were also, like the decor and the direction, the work of M. Marais. The favourable reports which we had had from Paris were seen to be justified, by the pro= duction in general and, in particular, by Marie Bell's performance as Agrippina, a model of classical control over the millimetres of gesture and the fine shades of inflexion. A connoisseur more experi- enced than I might conceivably find some faults in Mme Bell's delivery of Agrippina's incredibly long speeches, couplet mounting dizzily on couplet, to, at or against the young Nero, as he starts out tentatively on his career of crime ; but the style is so assured, the technique so finely calculated, that one was well content to be dazzled., Burrhus was strongly played by Jacques Eyser and Renee Faure's' Junia was as pure as her robe. Against the towering Agrippina, Jean Chevrier's Nero, Roland Alexandre's Britannicus, and Maurice Escande's Narcissus all dwindled somewhat, but here one saw how technique can keep the balance safe. This is the third and last week of the Comedie's visit, and .the programme has been a happy double-bill of Marivaux and de Musset, an elaborate sweetness followed by a sudden sharpness.
In a less crowded week 1 should have a good deal to say about Mr. Axelrod's admirable comedy which takes a commonplace situation (a husband left on his own in the hot summer and exposed to temptation) and a commonplace, average-chap sort of hero, and treats the first with disarming candour and the second with full regard for his humanity. Richard Sherman (Brian Reece) finds the temptation too much for him, and so does the naïve but knowing daughter of Eve (Rosemary Harris) who has moved into the apart- ment upstairs ; but no harm will come to either, it is suggested, through this encounter. The girl's curiosity is satisfied and the hero's seven-year-itch, as the title not altogether happily has it, 'is safely cured. The setting is New York City and the play is New Yorkerish altogether, but in so far as a prosaic comedy of this nature can approach universality this one does so, for the true spirit of civilised comedy is deftly observed throughout. It is pleasant to see one of the problems of the common man treated urbanely and wittily and with essentially decent feeling.
Lastly, I should like to recommend most warmly the revival of Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon's musical play which playfully, tune- fully, amusingly and tenderly conjures uPt an idealised image of Victorian middle-class society in a Thames-side suburb. These bouquets could have been no fresher when they were first presented. It is a delectable entertainment, and at its end the audience finds it
hard to let the players out of their sight. IA1N HAMILTON.
High Spirits. By Peter Myers, Alec Grahame, David Climie ; music by John Pritchett and Ronald Cass. (Hippodrome.)
A REVOLUTION in revue has been going on for several years, and I should say that High Spirits is the signal for the revolutionaries to emerge from the underground cellars in which they plotted, and assail the barricades of Leicester Square. An audience accustomed to sit in thousands (1,300 to be exact) and gaze at phoney nudes while barely listening to empurpled dialogue comes to the Hippodrome and watches the sort of witty sketch which used to be the monopoly of club-members huddled shoulder to shoulder in a few sdore of hard seats in some attic'or cellar. Some of them pay sixteen shillings to see what the well-informed could see two years ago for five. Do they understand the subtleties of the sketches about Sartre, Lord Leighton's model, Restoration comedy (not all that subtle) and Henry James ? Do they understand the difference between Emlyn Williams and Bransby Williams ? I have no idea, but I do know that I was astonished at the row made by those 1,300 pairs of palms clapping wildly at the sort of revue we used to delude ourselves could be
presented only in the " intimate " style. G. F.
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