Tussaud's Time Machine
WAXWORKS F.% NE does not expect Madame• Tussaud's to jproduce a new art form—and yet here she is with The Battle of Trafalgar . . . as it hap- pened. It is a new, hybrid, genre of spectacle, part theatrical, part waxwork, part academic: in H. G. Wells's centenary year we may well cate- gorise it as a Time Machine.
The story of Tussaud's Time Machine really begins in 1964 with Richard Buckle's brilliant but ill-fated Shakespeare Exhibition. Using all the modern techniques and media at his disposal— sculpture, painting, lighting, captions, sound and the est—he hurled us backwards to the sixteenth century. The exuberant, almost defiant baroque of this exhibition, which offended most critics at the time, obscured the potentialities of the basic idea. Timothy O'Brien, for instance (now designer of the Tussaud machine), made a walk- way through Elizabethan London: glimpses of a theatre, of a mad house, of the Queen carried in her litter caught the eye while the ear was assailed by horses galloping, street cries, cheers and the gloomy denunciations of a Puritan preacher. Clipped of its wider excrescences it was a form of experience not falling into any of the known categories, although connected to the 'happening.'
The new Battle of Trafalgar machine picks up and develops the idea: in a way it is like turning a corner and finding one- self in the middle of the last act of Goiter- dlimmerung and unable to get off the stage. Here one pushes open a bright scarlet door and plunges into gloom and turmoil. Ahead lies a staircase, to the left a map of Europe with the tentacles of Napoleon stretching across its sur- face, followed by a huge date, 1805, in burning neon light (slightly Wimpy Bar the last). The visitor is engulfed by deafening sounds of battle: drums beat and guns roar; there are the hoarse cries of men in conflict and over all the wafting strains of Heart of Oak. The coup de theatre comes at the top of the staircase. Suddenly one is standing on the lower deck of HMS 'Victory' during the Battle of Trafalgar. By the main hatch, between the main mast and the after capstan, some forty men tend four guns on the port side. Richard Pilbrow brings his theatrical experience to bear on the effect of guns firing: great flashes
of light at the portholes coincide with outbursts of sound and the swirl of sulphur fumes around one's feet.
Down a further staircase at the end there follows a caesura, a gay, pop art rendering of the battle and events on the 'Victory' herself, cul- minating in the news of Nelson's fatal wound. The idea is right though the mood is garish. But this is more than made up for in the final scene, by which time we have climbed down to the cockpit on the orlop side. Light fillers dimly from candles in lanterns and it takes a moment for the eye to adjust. There lies an outstretched shrunken man, the dying Nelson, surrounded by members of the ship's company, for all the world like a bizarre updated Lamentation over the Dead Christ. This is the grand historical group which is the quintessence of the Tussaud tradition, but here superbly done. The Time Machine lets one down to the sound of bells alternatively peal- ing to celebrate the victory and tolling for the dead. Near by there are inscribed Emma Hamil- ton's pathetic words: 'Oh miserable wretched Emma, Oh glorious and happy Nelson:
This form of spectacle is not only fun, it is also seriously instructive and the peculiar ambience of Tussaud's is absolutely right for it. It comple- ments and does not infringe on the proper province of a museum, and the ultimate scope is enormous. One cannot wait to see what could be done with, say, the Battle of Edgehill or Queen Elizabeth I entertained by Leicester at Kenilworth.
ROY STRONG
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