Theatre
Brogue Elephant
By ALAN BRIEN
The Ginger Man. (Fortune.)— Baikie Charivari. (Edin- burgh.)—The Shifting Heart. (Duke of York's.) The Ginger Man began as a much-bandied, much-banned, bawdy novel which was printed in France. It was imported into Britain with the encouragement of that earnest commando of the anti-Lo/i/o troop, Robert Pit- man, of the Sunday Express. Adapted for the stage by its author, J. P. Donleavy, it has now turned up as a play at the Fortune and has been widely garlanded as a masterpiece. It is nothing of the sort—or, rather, only something of the sort.
Mr. Donleavy here makes the opposite kind of dramatic mistake from Mr. Wesker in The Kitchen. Both playwrights start with a man in a trap talking to himself. Mr. Wesker is fascinated by the trap. This is how the teeth mesh, he says, that is how the trigger is sprung. This elaborate, ghastly, ingenious toy is a machine for catching people—isn't it (clang!) just like Life? Mr. Don- leavy is fascinated by the man. He loads him with quirks and eccentricities like a Christmas tree. Here is a present from Jimmy Porter, and another from Holden Caulfield, and another from Jim Dixon, and yet another from Stephen Dedalus. This elaborate, ghastly, ingenious boy is ideal bait for the trap—isn't he (ouch!) just like You? The answer in both cases is No. You cannot précis Life into one of the world's ten best plots. Indeed, Life does not exist : only people live. A symbol is only a symbol, though a good cigar is a smoke. Presumably Mr. Wesker discovered this after The Kitchen and so rolled us a tarry black gasper in Roots. But in his search for character, for the man scarred with the stigma of individuality, for the hero with a unique set of finger-prints, Mr. Don- leavy must also realise that eccentricity is not enough. The theatre is not a side-show.
His Dublin law-student hero, the ginger man, is a genuine freak. He nurses a sheep's head. He mimes crucifixion. He wears an old blanket as insignia of his lonely office. He drinks neat gin from the bottle as his sacrament. He is the un- printable priest of the four-letter men. His beha- viour is unspeakable but fortunately his dialogue is not. Embodied in Richard Harris, languaged by J. P. Donleavy, this brogue elephant in rut splen- didly trumpets out his brassy rhetoric. Tempor- arily occupying the uncomfortable howdah on his back when the play opens is his English memsahib —a bloodlessly refined Admiral's daughter. She is quickly thrown and proves to be a sawdust dummy, distantly related to Mr. Osborne's Alyson, who squeaks out such unlikely rebukes as 'You nasty blighter' and 'You absolute rotter.' (Wendy Craig, that talented creator of blank-eyed sluts, is radically miscast in this perfunctorily written part —a Mirror reader who has been delivered the Telegraph by mistake.) Our ginger tramples on, his thick skin spattered with insults, his bloodshot eyes madly rolling, his big feet stamping down the episodes, while he blares out his bawdy, bad-taste trombone solos. Somewhere around midnight he
gores a dogma-fed, sex-starved Catholic spinster— and suddenly, too late, a one-man entertainment seems about to blossom into a two-person play.
The Ginger Man is a triumph throughout for Richard Harris—a whey-faced, fiery-haired, in- tellectual thug who radiates vitality like a coke oven. Heroically handsome, enormously self- aware yet enormously unselfconscious, he inhabits the stage as if he had been born on that very spot. Roly-poly Ronald Fraser, as the American fat boy with the soul of a reedy English curate, demonstrates once again the versatility which lies concealed behind that suety crust. But though the evening is full of action, nothing ever happens— until Isabel Dean appears. Miss Dean is the play that Mr. Donleavy never got round to writing— the only real person in the script, the only charac- ter with any possibility of development. She is neither an eccentric castaway nor a universal symbol. She is a real individual trapped at a precise moment in a particular place. With the nervous, dark-eyed, mousy good looks of a young Celia Johnson, she movingly lives out the dilemma of a lonely passionate woman in a puritan society who sees no compromise between the nunnery and the whorehouse. Her line to the ginger man who relieves her and leaves her—`You think it's all a cod but you don't know Ireland'—has the rare right Ibsen ring.
I see no reason to be despondent because Mr. Donleavy, like most of the young playwrights, has not yet succeeded in producing a play, let alone a good play. If the time is not now, then it must be to come. Each new drama requires new audi- ences to applaud it, new actors to incarnate it, new language to articulate it, new traditions to feed it. Masterpieces are not produced by pupils. If it were as easy to weld together observation and elo- quence, accuracy and passion, realism and signifi- cance, characters and ideas, wit and seriousness as critics imagine, then critics would write great plays. Roots was one way of solving the problem. The Hostage was another. 7'he Baikie Charivari, the Bridle play which unaccountably was skipped over in Edinburgh, attempted to slide somewhere between the two. It is a perverse play obstinately vilritten against the stage conventions of ten years ago. But it has mellowed in the wood with age, and if it were put on under an assumed name at the Royal Court now would set the intellectuals a- twitter. (Surely Bridie deserves an equal chance with those two young revolutionary experimenters Messrs. Coward and Feydeau?) Peter Duguid's Edinburgh production was spirited and intelli- gent, though the direct addresses to the audi- ence, the interpolated songs and dances, the device of the play within a play, all needed the experi- enced back hand of Joan Littlewood to set them spinning. The Glasgow Citizens' Theatre cast un- veiled some three-dimensional refreshing un- actorish performances. If no one will sponsor a visit of this group in this play to the West End, perhaps television would allow us to see this neglected piece of super-Shaviana.
The Observer prizewinners have not been as favourably received on the stage as they were in the newspaper's office. Of those mounted so far, only The Resounding Tinkle has been both orig- inal and good and I cannot help recalling that Five Finger Exercise never even reached the judges but was weeded out at a junior level. The Shifting Heart is the latest to attempt the transfer from the page to the theatre. Like Moon On A Rainbow Shawl, it suggests that someone up there will swallow any amount of melodrama and senti- mentality as long as it conceals a progressive pill. The trouble here is that the pill is too large to be concealed and too powerful for the disease.
Like A Raisin in the Sun, like Hot Summer Night, The Shifting Heart is propaganda against racial prejudice—another family-crisis play about those little people who are as big as you whoever you are. The rows, the violence, the horseplay, the tears, are all predictable, but predictable in a pro- fessional, craftsmanlike fashion. Mr. Beynon can obviously write strong, middle-brow melodrama. The weakness is that he only sees his own side of the argument and he cannot eventually con- ceive (as Tennessee Williams, for instance, always can) how racialism can really hold its unholy black mass in any human heart. There are moments when Mr. Beynon seems about to let his little people grow up and behave arrogantly, unpredict- ably, humanly. The relationship between the Australian husband and the Italian wife is full of those odd tender brutalities of married life which are so common in fact and so rare in fiction. But they are never developed. This is a pity—because Richard J. Warren and Madge Ryan, especially, are players hacked out of solid hickory, ugly and tough and alive, who deserve to be more than dialectical puppets.
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