Theatre
Last love
Ted Whitehead
Oen Juan Comes Back from the War (Cottesloe) On the Out (Bush) Impending death weakens our interest in economics — unless what we're dying of is want of bread — and with eyes turned Skywards, or inwards, previously sane men start babbling about first love or asking What is the meaning of it all. Such is the convention of drama, at any rate, and Don Juan Comes Back from the War is no exception.
As with his earlier Tales from the Viena Woods, Odon von Horvath sets his play m a period of social dissolution that is ripe for Fascism. Here, the programme tells us, it's the period of the great inflation of 1919 to 1923 as experienced in Bavaria, which suffered traumatic political developments: a brief Social Democracy, reaction, chaos, the declaration of the first Bavarian Soviet Republic, the Second Republic, brutal suppression by White forces and the execution of the revolutionary leaders.
It takes the form of twenty-four tiny s.cenes (lasting ninety minutes with no interval) in which Don Juan, fresh or rather stale from the war, encounters thirty-five women while searching for the fiancée he had betrayed. The old rake now has a dicky heart, and his mind is on higher things than bAed, but he can't help being irresistible. And so the women come flocking, old ones, Yt)eng ones, gay ones, straight ones. But the trouble with sex is that it isn't necessarily a reciprocal desire, so that when Don fails to reciprocate he's subjected to hypocritical abuse and threats, and eventually becomes the victim of an under-age girl's sexual fantasies. He ends up dying in a snowstorm
at the tomb of his beloved, whom we have known all along to be dead.
The background of social collapse is sketched in: gunfire in the fields, a million marks worth a penny, no trains, a tyrannical grandmother denouncing the revolutionaries and a young woman campaigning for them, hectic music all day long in the cafés and women hunting for men and money on the streets. But Don Juan dismisses a young woman's socialist militancy with the weary smile of a man who has seen the truth — which appears to be romantic love.
I must say that, as someone who considers romantic love the worst cultural invention since religion, I didn't expect to enjoy this play. But! enjoyed it immensely, partly because of the inspired directness of Christopher Hampton's translation, and partly because of several fine cameos, by Judy Bowker, Susan Fleetwood and Susan Littler, and a masterly performance by Daniel Massey. I hope that the National continues with its exploration of Horvath, who is superior to Brecht in his perception of false consciousness, and his recognition that the sexual assumptions of a society — which dictate its patterns of mating and breeding — are as important as its economic ones. If he never penetrates the absurdity of romanticism, he does expose the cruelties perpetrated on each other by men and women in their banal faith.
Anyone born in Whitechapel in 1955 of a Nigerian father and Cornish mother, educated at a comprehensive but leaving at fifteen to work as a cutter in a clothing factory, should be well placed to write about the problems facing poor blacks in the East End. The strength of Tunde Ikoli's On the Out is that he doesn't ascribe the problems solely to colour; the weakness is that he doesn't ascribe them to anything else. The play is set in a Whitechapel squat, to which Zoltan, a young black thief, returns after his release from prison to decide whether to go straight or to resume his life of crime. There's no question for Horace, a snappy dresser with expensive tastes in pills and women, who prefers the risk of imprisonment to the drudgery of factory life; nor for Barry, infatuated with the glamour, who puts on all-leather gear for villainy, and is ashamed that he's never been to prison ('I've nearly been); nor for Jimmy, who sees himself as a victim of white society in contrast to Zoltan, who is happy to be English and sorry that we aren't in the World Cup finals. Dave, though, sees crime as a phase of adolescence, something you grow out of; the trouble is that, referring to his job, his wife and his two kids, he isn't very convincing about the homely delights of maturity. The only woman in the piece declares herself for family life and a nice place to live — after she has done some useful work in society.
Ikoli constructs his play cinematically, with frequent cuts from present to past, and he writes a slangy, humorous dialogue that sounds utterly authentic. It's the sort of
'dialogue that can work splendidly in films Where the gutter language perfectly complements the camera's observation of environment and behaviour. On stage, the style is too limited to illuminate the central concerns of the play. Technically it's interesting to compare it with Nigel Williams's Class Enemy which dealt with similar characters but endowed them with an explosive conventional eloquence. I think that Ikoli, who is obviously talented, might have strengthened his play by allowing his characters to reveal themselves more freely. It's really a problem of form. But there's a beautifully expressive and ingenious set by Caroline Beaver consisting of doors, doors, doors — on the walls and on the floors and every one of them closed. And there are arresting performances, particularly from Michael Feast, Roderick Smith, Lynne Pearson and Alan Igbon, in John Chapman's Foco Novo production.
In his conclusion to that brilliant study of developing consciousness, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, Raymond Williams refers to the achievements of film and television and expresses his belief that when the critical history of the next half-century of drama comes to be written 'the majority of its examples will be taken from these new forms'. I share his belief and am delighted to have the chance to check out what's happening in the field. So next week, the movies.
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