Theatre
Water torture
Giles Gordon
The War at Home (Hampstead) The Spanish Tragedy (National: Lyttelton) Aren't We All? (Theatre Royal, Haymarket)
or much of its four scenes, James Duff's first full-length play, The War at Home, is about precisely that: the horrors of family life, what those whose only ties are of marriage and of birth do to each other when living under a common roof. Sue Plummer has designed a trim set of the Colliers' home in suburban Dallas where storekeeper Bob (Timothy West), his wife Maurine (Frances Sternhagen) and their children, Karen, aged 20 (Sylvestra le Touzel), and Jeremy, aged 23 (David Threlfall), are endeavouring to survive Thanksgiving Day, 1973. David, and here lies the ostensible point, is a Vietnam veteran. He has been back home for a year but hasn't had a job. His silly, prattling mother (a maddeninglY effective performance by the American Miss Sternhagen) tries to persuade him to dress properly for the Thanksgiving meal — relatives are about to invade — but he won't, insisting upon wearing, in effect, his military fatigues. His father (Mr West as raging bull) orders him to, his sister goads him also.
Before Vietnam, he was the expectancy and fair hope of the family. Now, be become an embarrassment to all. In the alarming final scene, he draws a gun on its
father and tells how, in Vietnam, he was ordered by his sergeant to kill a defenceless gook. Mr Threlfall delivers this anguished speech thrillingly, justifying the stillness of his performance until then. As the gook rose up in front of him, it was his father's face that Jeremy saw, and he shot and shot. `You took every dream I ever had, and threw them away,' he says to his father. It may not have been Mr Duff's intent but the play comes across as a sickening indictment of the slow water torture that family life can be, what it can do to the individuals locked into it.
The ideas behind the dialogue are more interesting than the naturalistic texture which, at times, plunges towards melo- drama but Michael Attenborough, who directs for verisimilitude, and his cast play it for all they are worth. It is not to the credit of the American theatre that Alan Schneider, who was to have directed, failed to persuade a management in the States to put on the play. He died in hospital shortly before rehearsals were to have begun, having been knocked down in the Swiss Cottage traffic. Mr Duff, aged 29 from New Orleans, will be heard from again.
Michael Bogdanov's unusually res- trained production of Thomas Kyd's in- fluential revenge drama, The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1590), came across in 1982 in the Cottesloe as very much private, family tragedy with Michael Bryant's Hieronimo pursuing a father's crazed vengeance of his son's slaughter to the end, and beyond. In its transfer to the larger Lyttelton, the play has become more Spanish and Portuguese national tragedy. Mr Bryant's superb por- trayal of the aggrieved father remains but he is also Knight Marshall of Spain. When he discovers his son's body, like a strangled chicken on a vertical spit, dangling from a tree in his own garden his nobility is such that he cannot fully yield to grief. This restraint is just right and means that he can play the dark soliloquies and all-consuming later speeches full throttle, and his anguish is most moving.
The production is partly recast. For whatever reason, those in the original version are stronger than the newcomers. Janet Whiteside is as fine as before as Hieronimo's wife who goes mad, and Peter Needham as Revenge, the chorus, is helped by not having to sport the curious plerrot outfit he previously wore. Tom Marshall is menacing as the fat ghost of Don Andrea, the slaughtered man who sets the action going.
Chris Dyer's set with ox-blood-spattered walls resembles less imperial Spain and Portugal than a torture chamber. The costumes though and the stage pictures nicely echo Velasquez, and Henry Brown's eerie music is terrifying. The amount of blood that explodes about causes laughter that shouldn't be there, and Mr Bryant's biting off of his tongue and chucking the tip away is, inevitably, over the top. But what a relief to see the National again tackle a neglected and, by today's taste, almost unactable classic and, by judicious cutting, present it with commitment and integrity.
`Has anyone a stamp?' asks the stylish Nicola Pagett as Margot Tatham, wife of the Hon. Willie Tatham (Francis Matth- ews, smooth) who has had the misfortune of being caught by his wife, unexpectedly returning from Egypt to Mayfair, kissing a vamp. 'A stamp, my dear?' says sleepy, bumbling Rex Harrison as her father-in- law, Lord Grenham, plunging his hand into a pocket and producing one as if he's a mobile post office. This is one of the few unexpected and certainly livelier moments in Clifford Williams's production of Frederick Lonsdale's 1923 wisp of a play, Aren't We All?, that is Wilde without the lines and Maugham without the character- isation. It is not a well-made play com- pared with, for instance, Look Back in Anger.
Claudette Colbert is pleasant enough as Lady Frinton, out to bag if not bed Mr Harrison; John Price behaves impeccably as a jilted, blazered Australian; Madge Ryan is the perfect vicar's wife and Michael Gough so outrageous as the vicar that perhaps he should be rechristened Almighty Gough. Clifford Williams is one of our best directors. So are John Barton, John Dexter and Lindsay Anderson. All, in the last 18 months, have turned in bland and lifeless productions for Triumph Apol- lo at the Haymarket. I wish I knew why.
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