First Anniversary
The Dutch Courtesan, (National Theatre.)– The Corn is Green.
(Hampstead Theatre . Club.) IT is almost exactly a year to the day since the National Theatre first opened at the Old Vic, and infinitely too soon to reach conclusions about its achievements. Often it has been overshadowed and outplayed by the com- pany at the Aldwych; occasionally its choice of plays has been suspect; both companies, however, have already had a marked effect on the rest of London Theatre. Up to the moment I be- lieve that this has been harmful, for there are signs of polarisation. The real 'theatre war' is not about sex or dirty language but about the hold both the Aldwych and the National Theatre are gaining over theatre audiences, and the tendency, particularly among visitors to London, to see one of these companies or nothing at all Consequently, the commercial theatres are be- ginning to look for a rather different kind of audience and the old, semi-serious, problern plays and • even the star revivals where the audience come not so much to see the play as the actor are going out. When it tries hard, as with James Saunders's A Scent of Flowers, the work is persistently, even maliciously, battered by a number of critics, and plays to indecently poor houses.
To say this is not to criticise the subsidised coin pany system but to recognise how very fa there is to go. I myself shall not begin to be happy until there are up to half a dozen perman- ent subsidised companies in London, one of them perhaps playing only Shakespeare. At present we are still desperately dependent both for revivals and new plays on the commercial theatre throwing up something good, let alone actors and directors, and it would be terrible to see them thrown back on to farce and musicals. One of the reasons for this state of affairs Is clearly the failure of the smaller, semi-experi- mental theatres. Why is it, for instance, that the New Arts, whose influence could be so crucial, continually turns out poor productions of sonic very poor plays? Even the Hampstead Theatre Club, though it has had its successes, has had neither the courage nor the support one might have expected. And though the home of the brave at Stratford East has passed to a group high-mindedly putting on three plays of Euripides, with the present company it seems ill- troversion run mad.
One of the inevitable results of this state of affairs is that the two national companies are forced to try to be both avant-garde and estab- lished at the same time. With as yet no library of productions behind them, they are probably trying to do too much. It must have seemed too obvious to put on Faustus or Tantburlaine for the Marlowe quatercentenary; therefore we have The Jew of Malta. At the National Theatre before we have had a whiff of the infinitely better
plays of Ben Jonson, we are given Marston's The Dutch Courtesan. And the Aldwych's bold search for the experimental this summer led to the staging of one or two distinct duds. Again I stress that this is no criticism of policy but only of the depressing state of our theatre. Ultimately it might be no bad thing if both places settle more for the established, providing for the coach parties rather than a minority, a national show- place rather than a director's laboratory. They cannot do this, however, until there are others capable of taking over the experiments.
Actually The Dutch Courtesan is a harmless domestic comedy. Though I can imagine no reason myself why the National Theatre chose to put it on, it contains some fashionably accept- able bawdy and one or two pleasant bits of slap- stick. The main impression it leaves, as did The Shoemaker's Holiday earlier this year at the Mermaid, is of how extraordinarily good-natured some of these Elizabethan plays are. No modern writer would ever get away with it. In a sense a much more interesting and risky revival is at Hampstead. Perhaps it's a fault of the Eng. Lit. education that while most people have some creaking acquaintance with even Elizabethan rubbish, some of the lesser works and movements of the present century are vir- tually unknown. It can have occurred to few people either to read the plays of Emlyn Williams or to expect to see one of them. In fact, The Corn is Green is a revelation. There is the old living-room set with the actors making con- scientious use of the five entrances and exits, the lines that might be parody or from a revue, the elaborate twisting of the plot. Yet the tale of a Welsh miner being transformed by a spinster schoolmistress into an Oxford scholar actually and rightly held the whole theatre. Much is due to the cast, which includes Mary Miller, Kathleen Harrison, Pauline Jameson and Emlyn Williams's son Brook, but there is life in the text as well.
MALCOLM RUTHERFORD
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