Contemporary Arts
THE curtain rises on a hut, as primitive and homely as the fisherfolk who live in it. After some intimations of the supernatural, a knight in armour arrives, dominating the scene with the effortless arrogance of a man cocooned in protocol. Ondine appears : and knight-errant and water-nymph are engulfed in passion which soon transmits itself to a thoroughly aroused audience. That, at least, is the theory. At Bristol, the curtain rises on a weekend country cottage, with arty furniture, netting, and a sinuous drawing of a mermaid; a few goggles and an underwater gun would make it a creditable Regent Street shop-window dis- play for the tourist season. The knight is an amiable fellow, but he sounds as if he were rusticating after a somewhat fatiguing London season, rather than after a month's perilous adventure in the Black Forest. Ondine is no less urban in her manners; her accent is refined, her artlessness studied. They go through the formula: of love at first sight, but no hint of emotion reaches the audience; we are watch- ing two nice young people indulging in charades; that is all.
The eccentric adaptation of Giraudoux's play must take some of the blame; but the pro- ducer has gone out of his way to add handi- caps of his own making. The sets are over- blown in the second act, and grotesque in the first and last : the dresses are gay but irrele- vant (when the executioner loped on in his fancy pants, the audience actually giggled). The sound effects, on the other hand—which are more important—are feeble. But the trouble lies deeper. The production strikes no spark. Is this the fault of the producer, or of English audiences, which are unable to accept Giraudoux on his own terms?
Giraudoux was interested in people who believe themselves to live by a compound of reason and faith, but• are in fact swayed by more atavistic instincts : not only the pious peasant, who would sooner blaspheme than plough up a fairy mound, but also the cynical townswoman, who would never neglect to touch wood. Giraudoux wanted to examine human motives, but he found himself up against the dramatist's old problem : how to allow the unconscious mind to express itself on the stage.
One path was open to him : he could speak through the supernatural. Just as Shakespeare had used witches to express Macbeth's crav- ings, so Giraudoux could use anthropomorphic Greek gods (in Amphitryon and The Tiger at the Gates), or ghosts (in The Enchanted) or water-nymphs. In Ondine, for example, he con- sidered the liberating effects of uninhibited love on personality. If Ondine had been a 'real' person audiences would have scoffed : 'real' girls don't behave that way I As she was a water-nymph, she could behave how Giraudoux wished her to behave—provided that audiences accepted his convention. Eng- lish audiences do not. If Ondine 'had been kept on the level of fantasy, they would approve; but they are reluctant to take her (or the boy in The Enchanted) seriously.
The reason, I take it, is that the attitude of the English playgoer is coloured by his scepti- cism about the supernatural. He feels at ease with water-nymphs, leprechauns or hobgoblins only when they keep their place : in the nur- sery with Peter Pan, in folklore museums, in fantasy. Who he is asked to take them seriously, he feels he is being asked to believe in them; and this embarrasses him. Even the witches in Macbeth are rarely now played as witches : they are made funny or peculiar; and the trolls in Peer Gynt are usually called upon to behave like a corps de ballet. Only two human manifestations of the supernatural are enjoyed in the serious theatre here; the devil, who may emerge as Mr. Bolfry, and a divine father-figure who may attend cocktail parties on the third floor back.
This handicaps the producer of. Giraudoux; for it makes some of his key scenes virtually unplayable. Consider the case of The Tiger at the Gates. Towards the end of the play, a messenger arrives from the gods to give their advice—advice as mutually contradictory as one would expect, seeing that it is being ten- dered by the forces of Lust, Reason and Power. The effect is to drive Hector and Ulysses into taking things into their own sensible (as they imagine) control, instead of wasting any more time hearing silly arguments, human or divine. The scene, therefore, is vital to the course of the play; it can be taken seriously, or played for laughs; or an attempt can be made at that high tragicomedy that one associates with O'Casey. It is a test of a producer's sensi- bility what he does with it. In London the scene was cut.
Violence of the same sort has been done at Bristol to the second act of Ondine, which bears only sporadic resemblance to Girau- doux's. The supernatural element is muted; instead, the King of the Ondines does some polite but rather clumsy conjuring tricks. The
effect on both cast and audience is immediate. Moira Shearer, in particular, regains con- fidence. She has to play the part of the child who insists on seeing the wart on the emperor's nose (a good performance here by the emperor, Eric Porter); and at court, her town manners cease to be incongruous. Still more encouraging—by the third act she has begun to impose herself on the part; her first- act restlessness disappears, to be replaced by an agreeable repose; the return to the country does not mean a return to bathos. The audience, admittedly, remains unmoved. Partly this is because Miss Shearer has too small a range of voice and expression : but it is partly because Ondine lacks a foil. The agony of the knight-errant's humility, when he finds that court. life is only an elaborate empty game, can be felt only if he has earlier shown himself apparently invulnerable; and he has not. Therefore he leaves no impression, as he fades out; and we can feel little pity either for him or for Ondine, in her loss. In fairness, it has to be said that the part could be carried by few English actors; perhaps only Olivier— why has he not attempted it? And I can think of no English actress who could be relied upon to make something of Ondine, in that exacting first act.
BRIAN 1NGLIS
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