THEATRE
Bodywork
HILARY SPURLING
The Magistrate (Chichester) A Flea in her Ear (Old Vic) Lysistrata and Oedipus Rex (Greek Art Theatre at the Aklwych)
Consternation at Chichester and the National Theatre last week, the crunch of broken glass, the thud of pounding feet or falling bodies, the piercing cries of women and the bowls of men in pain. It is a happy chance which puts Pinero's The Magistrate alongside Feydeau's spectacular return to the Old Vic. Twenty years separate these two masters' farces, and both offer an uncommonly fine line in dis- obliging servants, jealous lovers, snooping between these two monstrous paragons, wives. Indeed, one would be hard put to choose Pinero's Mrs Posket and Feydeau's Madame• Chandebise; or, for that matter, between Michael Aldridge as the whey-faced Captain Horace Vale, Pinero's lamentably bashful English lover, and Edward Petherbridge, worn to a shred by his prodigious conquests, as Fey- deau's inordinately vain French one.
Fate conspires in both plays to tweak a blameless citizen—and Victor Emmanuel Chandebise is as much a model of social and domestic propriety as the luckless Mr Posket —from the paths of duty to a shady hotel, haunt of gamblers, sots and libertines, where, to the unspeakable horror of all parties, he finds his entire household also by chance assembled. If anything can match the pande- monic climax of Feydeau's second act, it is the supernatural stillness which descends on Pinero's when, in a sudden raid on the hotel, the inmates play hide-and-seek with the police on a stage plunged in darkness and so charged With claustrophobia that, even from the audi- torium, one has a sense of physical discomfort —of stifled breathing, cramped bodies, stale air and stuffy draperies—as seven people cower in mortal dread while the sergeant listens, with immense complacency, to the beating of their hearts. Few things are pleasanter in this play than Pinero's habit. of lingering, after a stupen- dous burst of speed, ow its murkiest moments. He lingers again on Posket's lament next 'InOrniOg which, in Alistair Sim's plaintive, in- deed heart-rending, tremolo, becomes an aria on the horrors of the night. Shortly afterwards, in circumstances too horrible to mention, Posket has hysterics; and Mr Sim in hysterics—a state to which, even in his few carefree moments, this
nervy, drooping, miserable frail creature is peculiarly prone—is a pretty sight. John Cle- ments, on the other hand, presents a spectacle of supreme gallantry, self-sacrifice and iron discipline as Colonel Lukyn who, having unwittingly contrived what he takes to be the manslaughter of his dearest friend, still continues serving supper to two uninvited and ungrateful ladies. His guests meanwhile, gaily wolfing devilled oysters, remain perfectly indifferent to an agony of remorse visible only —such is their host's heroism in face of life or death—in a slight worsening of his table manners.
The play is directed by Sir John with for- midable panache, admirably set by Carl Toms. If the production has a fault it is that the odious infant, Cis (passed off for fourteen when he is in fact five years older) is, in the person of Christopher Guinee, a thought too willowy and graceful to convey the full horror—the gruff voice, sprawling limbs and manly chest burst- ing out of his Eton jacket—of Pinero's vision of precocious vice and adolescent sex.
Meanwhile, at the Old Vic, Frank Wylie's homicidal Spaniard, Edward Hardwicke's Camille and Geraldine McEwan's exquisite Madame Chandebise have, if anything, im- proved with time. And Laurence Olivier has added a new and wild invention of his own: a pursy butler whose stroppy answers, ogling eye, mincing walk and absurdly tight bum- freezer make him a disgrace to any well-run pantry.
And so to Karolos Koun's Greek Art Theatre, occupying the Aldwych for the past fortnight with two superb productions. Nothing could be more captivating than the lewd jokes, bright colours and gay, lilting dances of Mr Koun's Lysistrata. On my right, a band of staid and portly matrons, positively inflamed with lust, on my left what seems to be a chorus of ancient charladies with dusters knotted round their heads, blissfully agog in the know- ledge that scarcity has lent them an allure which time had long since dimmed. But, if Mr Koun brilliantly eschews the dutiful and dowdy, he is equally remote from the patronising dinkiness so difficult to avoid with these antique comedians.
True, it has been generally agreed that this production concentrates on the play's political rather than its sexual implications; and cer- tainly these tubby lechers, in tiny, dangling pleated skirts and woolly tights, do not seem particularly suited to what is normally under- stood by sexual comedy. Even that titillating episode on a mattress in the public street is here remarkably prosaic. Instead of a tantalis- ing and voluptuously slow striptease, we get a dumpy housewife undressing in a flap, pre- occupied less with her own ample charms than with the niceties of bedmaking. Viewed objectively as we are forced to watch her, this frisky lady makes copulation seems a ludi- crously ungainly business.
And if the women, bottled up in the Acropolis and panting to get out, seem hot and bothered rather than languorously melt- ing, then much the same thing happens with the men who started out so cockily and who, as the strain begins to tell, take to hobbling round the city, bent double with Thwarted desire whose pangs seem indistin- guishable from cramp. By the end, the citizens of Athens are clustering round Lysistrata like so many shrill and aggravated children: indeed.
Nelly Angelidou's Lysistrata—a charming creature whose resourceful sternness sits rather sweetly on her mild face and pillowy maternal curves—seems to grow taller as her victims dwindle. But this is part of a subtle foreshorten- ing which works throughout the play. The point is precisely that these are not children but grown men whose sulks and tantrums are less easily forgiven.
The greed, vanity and cowardice which may be expected from a child are not so funny in the rulers of the world. Especially when those rulers were at the time conducting, with re- markable ineptitude, a bitter and protracted war. So that, as with Mr Koun's production of The Frogs, gusts of a fiercer humour come whistling between the lines. One has a sense of the absurdity of these puny, dwarfish bunglers confronting forces hopelessly beyond their reach: the counterpart, in short, of Sophocles's tragic heroes seen as human toys on a stage dominated by vast hills beneath an empty sky. An effect which, even in the gilt- and-plush surroundings of the Aldwych, the severity, lucidity and the bold lines of Mr Koun's Oedipus Rex brilliantly preserve.
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