Word-play
Mark Amory
Translations (Hampstead) Have You Anything to Declare? (Round House) An Evening with Quentin Crisp (Mayfair) Brian Friel has been writing plays for over 30 years and among those that have been put on in London are The Freedom of the City in 1973 and Faith Healer this year. Yet here he is known rather than famous, perhaps because all his work is set in Ireland but does not come on as strong, is not as flamboyant or rhetorical, as the London theatre expects its Irishmen to. be. Brendan Behan, interrupting his own first nights with drunken abuse, is the sort of roaring boy the West End takes to its heart, at least for a time. Brian Friel, on the other band, gives his recreations as reading, trout fishing and slow tennis. He is said to have celebrated the news from London reviewers that he has written a modern classic, with a bowl of soup, a lump of bread and a glass of milk.
Translations takes place in County Donegal in 1833 in a barn that is being used as a school and gives the impression of being entirely composed in shades of grey. A noticeably drab set is sometimes so in order to show off the brilliant colours before it. At the National Theatre's production of Richard III last year when a trench from the chopping block ran red with blood one spectator cried with relief, `Ah, at last! A touch of colour'. Nothing so gay is Presented here, nor is there much in the way of drinking, shouting or singing, though there is a little of each. The tone is for the most part quietly comic, sometimes quietly romantic or sad. This in spite of an abundance, I think an over-abundance, of plot. The school is for adults with the teaching being assisted by his son, Manus. They are also rivals for the headmastership of a new national school. Manus's brother returns home as interpreter for the English sappers who have come to anglicise the local place names. The young lieutenant takes Manus's girl but then disappears; we think he has been murdered and we think we know by whom: So do the English army who plan savage reprisals. There is enough conflict here to fuel several plays, one of them a passionately felt and over-written denunciation of English violence. This, thank heavens, is not that. The wielding of Power is part of colonial rule, but Friel is more interested in subtler aspects. So, though the English captain is conventionally insensitive and prepared to be ruthless, his lieutenant is sympathetic, if naive. He loves the people and the place and, though he notices that his presence is resented, we only see him treated at worst with politeness, and usually with friendliness.
As the title suggests, the main concern of the play is with language and its power. The first act opens with Manus coaxing words from a girl who later, under stress, reverts to incomprehensible sounds. There is much quoting in Latin and Greek which the programme assures us were known even in the wildest districts. The sappers' lack of Irish mars their efficiency as their orders are altered in translation; but later when they are more urgent, they are rendered accurately. Earlier their English is imitated as comic gibberish. The monoglot lieutenant is isolated from what he admires, though love, charmingly, finds a way. The renaming of places is at the centre of the action and we are made to feel that it is a cultural assault, an undermining of national identity. The schoolmaster, who writes poetry only in Latin, describes Irish as 'a syntax opulent in tomorrows. It is our response to mud cabins and potatoes', and later, as usual, says that there are three points to be made and then makes only two: 'a) — it is not the literal past, the facts of history that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language . . . b) — we must never cease renewing those images; because once we do, we fossilise.' That had the biros of the critics racing across their notepads but Translations has not really got so easily definable a message or even a point of view about language, except that it is important — at least not that I could pick out at one performance.
The whole evening consists of examples and qualifications of that importance, skilfully stitched into a story. They register as they flick past but do not form a pattern. Meanwhile, more immediately enjoyable are the documentary interest of how they lived then and the pleasure of getting to know these sympathetic people. It is a theatrically under-exploited truism that it is more fun spending time with nice people than with nasty ones and these, with all their frailties, are nice ones. So when a benign old scholar believes that he is engaged to be married to the goddess Athena, I resented it because I could not believe that he would really think that and felt a point was being made at his expense. Excellent naturalistic playing is essential and achieved; it is a sure sign of success if, when a character makes some announcement, your eyes dart from face to face to see how each of the others is taking it. Stephen Rea blends sulky mistrust with simplicity and goodness, Ian Bannen, electrifying as a very different schoolmaster in the television serial Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, is always interesting and intelligent and it is hardly his fault if he is less Irish than the others.
My father put me off fireworks for years by claiming that, once you have seen some good ones, it is just as satisfactory to stay in the warm, close your eyes and imagine them. The same might be said of French farce and in neither case is it quite true. Before seeing Have You Anything to Declare? we know what to expect. The plot will involve mistresses, misunderstandings, mistaken identity and, very likely, missing trousers. The actors will rush about stabbing their fingers in each other's faces, slamming doors before leaning against them puffing from exhaustion and nervous strain; minor characters will tend to be foreign and have physical deformities, even perhaps a far-fetched mental condition so that at the mention of a certain word they faint or begin barking. All this has to be planted in the first act, which will therefore be a little slow, grow complicated in the second and best, and somehow avoid anticlimax as it comes to the foreseeable resolution in the third. The initial impact of the odd, boldly-drawn characters may tide us over the time taken to wind up the plot while people tell each other things they must know already or could not want to, and then, if all is well-managed, action takes over.
Have You Anything to Declare?, by Hennequin and Veber, has most of this but lacks the spiralling logical madness and economy of the ideal farce. A young husband fails to consummate his marriage because he is interrupted by a customs official intoning the title of the play. His parents-in-law threaten an annulment if he cannot do better within three days, but a tearful rival pops up in a false beard to utter the dreaded query whenever he is making progress. So far, so good, but the Algerian camel-dealer who wishes to find his wife's lover invades the home of a man who has the same name and, as it happens, has now taken up with her, and also happens to be passing when a pair of trousers are urgently needed. Also a sub-plot about a killer stalking the streets— the vampire of Vincennes — is introduced and then scarcely used. All this is played with great zest by Brian Cox and Derek Griffiths, charm by Susan Littler and farcical attack by Dilys Hamlett. I laughed three times, loudest when Doug Fisher bowed obsequiously low, his hands trailing the floor, and then, on hearing bad news, stayed down. I also smiled a lot and never even thought of looking at my watch.
As Quentin Crisp has become famous he has become less like a dubious uncle and more like Alec Guinness playing a dear old granny. His message is that style is the thing, any old style. To thine own self be true, and you can select the self as long as you do not opt for evening classes on pottery or basket-weaving. There is no need to be rich, good-looking or talented to succeed; he instances Eva Peron, a wrestler friend of his, Joan Crawford and Amy Semple Macpherson as striking selfinventions but his best example is himself. He cannot exactly do anything and does not pretend to fill his new role as 'a mail-order guru' with particular efficiency but, like another English homosexual, he is off to America with nothing but his genius to declare, confident that it can be turned into money. The chat show is his natural setting. At chat he is excellent.
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