Old Ladies Never Die
Dir g MOM E-1.
THEATRE
By HILARY SPURLING
ALFRED 'MIRY. creator of Ubu, friend of Valery, Bonnard, Ravel; Picasso drew him and so did Beardsley. Rousseau painted his por- trait, Gide put him in his first novel; posthu- mously idolised by dadaists, surrealists and absurdists in turn. he was, or may have been, the first man to wear a painted tie on his shirt- front. Also the father, in the theatre, of that deliberate childishness which has had such a very long run for its money in twentieth-century art. 'It would . . . upset the old ladies, scandalise some, at any rate make people sit up; and then it's never been done before,' he said in 1896, explaining why he wanted a boy instead of a young woman to play the fourteen-year-old Bougrelas in Ubu Roi. At the Royal Court in 1966 the part is played by a young woman— against the author's express wish but in obedience to his spirit of defying contemporary stage practice. Plus fa change . . . as Jarry himself predicted.
But there is another, and far less innocuous, kind of childishness always with us in the theatre: the kind, born of inertia and complacency, which Jarry first set out to scarify: the childish- ness of the 'old ladies' themselves, of the public which admired Labiche and Dumas fils in the I890s, and which today admires Boeing-Boeing and Say Who You Are and a whole succession of idiot musicals. This is the public for whom Lindsay Anderson's production of The Cherry Orchard at Chichester is presumably designed, and whom—as several of my colleagues have pointed out—it can hardly fail to please.
Jarry was much exercised by the problem, peculiar to his age and ours, of public taste. He constantly reverts to his distinction between the herd and the select few: 'rinfinie mediocritt and the small number—he put it at about five hundred—who had an inkling what Shakespeare was about. His mistake, as a dramatist at least, was that, instead of writing for the five hundred he could respect, he chose to write for a public he considered moronic. He himself recognised the mistake, and was ready with his excuse : It is because the public is an inert, obtuse and passive mass that it is necessary from time to time to give it a kick, sc that one can tell' by its bear-like grunts where it is—and how it's getting along.' He got his bear-like grunts all right—fighting in the stalls on the first night, repercussions that shook literary Paris for months—and paid the price, of becoming prisoner of the very standards he despised. He wanted to shock the public in terms it would immediately grasp—and there was a definite attraction for him in descending to the extreme naiveté and crudeness of Ubu; but it meant, as Jarry must privately have suspected, that the play would appeal ever after only to crude and naive minds.
_Tarry, of course, knew perfectly well that an original work of art may pass over the heads of the crowd at first but, given time, will inevitably percolate downwards; he noted that Ibsen's method, being more discreet, was surer in the long run; and he fooled himself as much as his admirers when he said he wanted his play to hold up a mirror in which man's baser nature was reflected in the shape of Ubu: an image (according to one critic, who had Jarry's whole- hearted approval) 'of eternal human imbecility, eternal lust, eternal gluttony, the vileness of instinct magnified into tyranny; of the sense of decency, the virtues, the patriotism. and the ideals peculiar to those who have just eaten their fill.' This idea of Ubu—Yeats's 'Savage God,' Jarry's 'double ignoble, Gauguin's 'human body with the soul of a woodlouse'—has a powerful attraction. But, as so often with the Bogeymen of Modern Art, the idea does not tally with what the artist actually did.
Ubu emerges from the text as greedy, dirty, incontinent, naughty in all the nursery ways; his notion of kingship is being able to eat sausages and own an umbrella; when crossed, generally by his wife, he would like to scratch her eyes out, bite her up, chop her into little bits. 'Adieu, Pere Ubu. Tue bien le czar,' says Mere Ubu, waving goodbye like Nanny; and Ubu's own plan for inflating taxation—`with this system I shall quickly make an enormous fortune; then I shall kill the whole world and go away'—is there to show the monstrous childishness of human society. But Jarry is caught in his own trap. In a world of puppets, emotionally undeveloped and with no responsibility, there is no suffering and so no pity or fear. Murder is pure pleasure when Mr Punch is the assassin. In fact, as we rush from Poland to Russia and back. like Alice on the chessboard, as wars take place, massacres and executions, all with such ease and speed and so painlessly, we have the sense the infant Jarry must have had (he was fifteen when he wrote the first version) of buoyancy, release and power. The effect, until the thing begins to pall, is like a child's dream—exhilarating rather than upsetting.
And so fain Cuthbertson's production, which ignores or flatly contradicts all Jarry's known instructions (about masks, flat delivery and so forth), very properly brings out the play's essential harmlessness. Mr Cuthbertson has not so much translated as rewritten the text, with a liberal contribution of his own; inserted songs and interludes and cast Max Wall as Ubu. Mr Wall and his Olde English jokes bring their own sense of what Michael Flanders calls 'Pee, po, bum, belly, drawers.' The production as a whole has little sense of style, always excepting John Shepherd's excellently grisly Mere Ubu; an odd figure here and there in the crowds which Jarry forbade; and, of course, David Hockney's sets and costumes—in particular his Chelsea duke in skin-tight mauve pants and peroxide wig; his legends spelt out along the front of the stage; his mournful, purple Tsarist Russia; and his bright green hilly Polish fields. Mr Hockney's peculiarly English sense of humour would not mix well with Jarry's occasional macabre shafts of wit; so perhaps it is just as well that most of these have been expunged.
All in all the Royal Court offers a fairly jolly evening, and May do more if it helps to demon- strate that to descend into childishness from a sense of outrage is to play into the enemy's hands. But, though one may hope that Ubu Roi which began it all will alto see the end of the whole absurd fallacy, let us never forget the enemy. Vulgarity and insensitivity are in our midst today as much as ever in Jarry's time, and never more so than last week at Chichester.
It has been widely agreed that something has gone badly wrong with this production of The Cherry Orchard; what it is precisely may not seem so clear. The fault has been diagnosed in the Chichester theatre itself, its wide arena stage and open tiers of seats being hostile to the intimacy so necessary to Chekhov With this play, in particular, it is important for the audience to be able to locate the orchard on which so many people have pinned their hopes and dreams—for a new and vigorous Russia, for a return to the good old days of serfdom, or for maintaining the status quo, as the case may be. The first step then, is to decide where the orchard shall be, outside which window, a decision Mr Anderson has not felt able to take. Or if he has, he hasn't told his cast, whose eyes roam round on all four sides, searching the 'audience in vain for a hint of cherry trees. The second act ought to suit this stage better: 'you will make provision for a real green field, and a path, and a horizon wider than is usual on the stage,' wrote Chekhov to Nemirovich-Danchenko; but what we get (from Alan Tagg) is dusty ivy and a few boxes, more like a railway siding really.
Shoddiness and a sense of indecision run through the whole production. If certain complex points about the sale and the mounting debts emerge more clearly than usual, it is because there is very little else on which to fix the atten- tion. With the exception of Zena Walker's Varya, no single member of the cast seems to have much faith in his own motives or preocCupations. Some are embarrassed—Hugh Williams's Gaev, for instance, apologising by his wooden demean- our for his quaint fixation on the bookcase. Some adopt a brave front. Celia Johnson covers up for Ranevskaya's odd changes of mood with a tinny tearfulness. Tom Courtenay enjoys a joke, like falling down the stairs, but can't conceal that he is at a loss for what to make of Trofimov. All rise manfully, on that peculiar note of solemn feeling, to words like 'young,' `spring,' lonely,"if only I could forget my past.'
Now, it may be objected that it is hard for English actors to convey any real sense of Russia at the turn of the century, of peasant blouses, samovars and wild-eyed visionaries. It has been done, but it is difficult. We have never, so far as I know, seen a Cherry Orchard transplanted to the English countryside, say Sussex in the 'sixties—a large house behind laurel hedges whose inmates are struggling to cope with novel class attitudes, rising taxation and the dwindling moral standards of the nation. This, too, might be managed. But what Mr Anderson has done is to succumb to the very complacency and super- ficiality which Chekhov sought to examine. I mentioned Boeing-Boeing, which may seem harmless enough in itself; as no doubt Dumas fils was in his prime. But the attitudes it fosters are contagious. And when the contagion spreads to Chekhov, reducing a great play to the same trite level, playing for cheap laughs and facile tears, one can well understand why Jarry felt the need to relieve himself by scribbling school- boy obscenities.
Or Chekhov's feelings, on seeing a production in Yalta in 1904, own brother to the present one: 'Is this really my Cherry Orchard? Are these my characters? . . . none of this is mine. I describe life. It is a dull, philistine life. But it is not a tedious whimpering life. First they turn me into a weeper and then into an utter bore.'
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