Contemporary Arts
Plays at Edinburgh
EVERY year the Edinburgh Festi- val Society gives its official blessing to at least four theatrical ventures. This is not, compared with its musical offspring, very prolific, but it has one or two 4Wpast successes to its credit (notably two Eliot premieres) which no sane person would begrudge it, and it at least shows a trifle more enterprise in this field than in its musical transactions.
Nevertheless, there are moments when one doubts whether the Society has the slightest idea what initiative really means. This year is a par- ticularly good example. The season's big gesture of leadership to British Theatre was obviously intended to be Jonathan Griffin's new play The Hidden King. The pretensions of Mr. Griffin's programme note and the later furore make it clear that this was to be one of the highlights of the Festival, another Christophe Colomb, an historical allegory which should enable us 'to be, for a' moment, Man knowing himself,' as Mr. Griffin expresses it. The data for this knowledge are as follows: the headstrong young King of Portugal, Sebastian, sets off (c. 1580) on a Crusade against the Moors from which he never returns. The crucial question remains in abey- ance for twenty years until a pretender appears in Venice—is the king alive or dead? Mr. Griffin backs the stranger for king, a king, moreover, who has learnt through suffering, but who dies a Martyr's death at the hands of unscrupulous Politicians. The critics rightly objected to this tale on several excellent grounds : (a) it was far too long at four hours (it was once more like eight) for modern flesh and blood; (b) the verse was turgid, overwritten and obscure; (c) the plot was complicated past comprehension and cloaked in any case by a fog of philosophical hot air.
The outraged cries of pain with which actors and sponsors greeted these comments were piteous to hear. We were accused of hooliganism by a leading actor and informed by a lady that her lines were some of the most beautiful she had ever had to speak. More significant, however, were the complaints from the organisers that this sort of criticism would ruin any such experi- mental venture in the future and that the whole future of the British theatre was in the balance.
The saddening thing about all this was not that actors should be so wildly at variance with critics on a matter of evaluation, for everyone knows that no actor could think ill of a play that gave him plenty of speaking and running about to do, some gorgeous costumes to don, and lines to speak, over whose surface allitera- tion and internal rhyme had been sprinkled like hundreds and thousands on a custard; no, the significant lesson is that the Artistic Director of the Festival and his reading committee should be able to sit back smiling in the paradise of having been 'experimental' for the year, blissfully unaware that they have 'experimented' with a throwback to those fruity Victorian pieces in verse and period costume of which Tennyson's half-forgotten plays were the poor best. Money and care have been lavished on the production; Christopher West, the producer, and Leslie L.HutrY, the designer, do wonders and are wonder- 'ay abetted by Robert Speaight and Robert
Eddison, but their efforts are not enough to trans- form the play from a piece of fustian into a real contribution to "the Drama or the choice of it from an act of obtuseness into an act of courage.
The other official Festival fare is pleasant if a trifle uninspired. Sartre's Nekrassov has been followed by a lightweight skit on the Twenties called Man of Distinction, by Walter Hasen- clever, a German expressionist playwright who died at the beginning of the last war. Its theme, and Hasenclever was too much of an intellectual to avoid one even in a comedy, is materialism— suppose that love were treated simply as a matter of business. The con-man who battens very suc- cessfully on the need of elderly ladies for love is, he points out, not much different from the businessman who battens with equal efficiency, if less directly, on their need for financial security. It is just possible to imagine a biting and vicious production by, say, Brecht of this material, but Denis Carey chooses to play on the enormous charm of dialogue, and who should blame him? The result is the lightest touch, the mildest satire, the least-demanding evening one could wish for. Peter Rice's delightful, stylised sets follow suit and so do Anton Walbrook and Moira Shearer.
Another charm-spinner is Robert McLellan's Flowers o' Edinburgh, a comedy of eighteenth- century Scottish manners in dialect. Well inten- tioned, well informed (plenty of good background stuff about pocket boroughs and so forth), it is like some dear old dominie giving his class an illustrated talk on the period. It is helped enor- mously by faultless production, good acting and an unobtrusive tour de force from Duncan MacRae as a retired John Company's man over whose sharp Scots tongue a sly film of Indian graciousness is miraculously spread.
By far the most successful and, imaginative theatrical venture embarked on by the Society was a Shakespeare recital given by Sir John Gielgud. It was an astonishing and highly charac- teristic performance—quiet, cerebral, beautifully spoken, a little understated, leaving the unmis- takable impression that here was, if not the most versatile, certainly the most intelligent actor on the English stage. It was interesting to see -how the intelligence is a constant counterweight to the limitation of range; it was not only that he picked his passages with great care, avoiding, as he would on the stage, the parts which require colossal dynamics, but also that in the parts on the border- line of his range he chose unerringly the only way to make his small, exact gestures and his curiously ethereal voice seem in place. He is not, for instance, a Hotspur, yet Hotspur's account of the popinjay soldier was so vivid that one lost any sense of incongrbity. In the melancholy, the pensive, the nostalgic, any part with a dying fall, he is in his element and is matchless; if he does not soon play Richard II again in London it will be a sad omission.
Last but far from least we were confronted by Miss Anna Russell. Being, in her way, an opera singer, she ought perhaps to be Mr. Mason's meat (if she will pardon the expression), but she is at the same time a marvellously funny theatrical turn, the egghead's Gracie Fields. She has the same irreverent cackle, the same massive figure, the same jutting jaw and the same blessed touch of vulgarity. Her victims are musical pretensions
and absurdities of all kinds, and she tears them apart with a cannibalistic gusto not to be missed.
The 'fringe' productions are as usual a triumph of ingenuity and perseverance over unamenable conditions. The London Theatre Group are more favoured than most in the matter of hall and stage and take full advantage of the fact with a charming and beautifully acted production of Rosemary Anne Sisson's The Queen and the Welshman—an autumnal love story in much the same kind of costumes as The Hidden King. Being simple, sentimental, and totally unpreten- tious, it gave about twice as much pleasure as that monstrous work.
At the other end of the physical scale are the Players of Leyton, a London schoolboy group who act Hamlet in the gilded discomfort appro- priate to the hall of a public school. It is, however, well worth enduring the torments involved for the sake of an astonishing performance by Derek Jacobi, an eighteen-year-old who brings to Hamlet a presence and tension worth about thirty years' experience.
The Oxford Theatre Group likewise juggle with age. Their choice is Ugo Betti's Corruption in the Palace of Justice, a smelly and powerful study of old age and cynicism and disillusionment. The feat of mental and physical sleight-of-hand re- quired is prodigious, and its triumphant success really puts this production at the top of the list.
DAVID WATT
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