Creaky bauble
Lloyd Evans
Absolutely! (Perhaps) Wyndhams Theatre Something Cloudy, Something Clear Finborough Theatre.
I f Absolutely! (Perhaps) had been written
today and not in 1917 it would have been rottweilered. I can just hear the critics cackling at the monotony of its narrative development, the frailty of its characterisation and the absurd vanity of its flirtation with metaphysics. Pirandello sets out to prove that truth is relative and not absolute, a conclusion most of us can reach without the help of a playwright. You will find profounder reflections on lolly sticks. Then again, it's hard to imagine this being staged as a new play. Its attempt to marry comedy, suspense and philosophy is both grandiose and shallow, and its huge, lumbering cast of 20 could have been cut in half with advantage. But gulfs of time and space confer eminence on mediocre playwrights. Pirandello, an exotic Sicilian, won the Nobel Prize in 1934. That helps too. So here it is, a creaky bauble by a dud genius.
It takes him the whole of Act Ito give us the essential facts. Once grasped these seem barely worth possessing. Two newcomers in a small Italian town accuse each other of being mad. Who is telling the truth? The town is seized with curiosity as the pair of loons swat their slanders over the net. Convention prohibits reviewers from disclosing the outcome of a show which relies on suspense for its effect. OK, I won't squeal. But a word of warning. At the premiere one play-goer was so maddened by the lame conclusion that he ripped his seat out of the floor and threw it at Pirandeilo's head. I'm amazed he could summon the enthusiasm. It's not bad enough to risk murder. A punch in the face would have been enough.
Apart from the play, though, this is a perfectly decent night at the theatre. The acting, for example, is marvellously adequate. Each cast member discreetly attempts to outpunch the others using whatever slim material the text provides. I had Barry Stanton ahead on points. Rosy and plump as a Christmas gammon, he glides around in a pin-stripe suit getting good laughs from improvised bits of business. Liza Tarbuck's earthy ebullience counts for nothing here, since there is virtually nothing for her to do except cluck, whisper, stare and blink. Timothy Bateson does a nice turn as the lugubrious butler, moping on and off stage like a squashed plum with a grievance. And there's Joan Plowright, the star attraction. I was under the impression that she limits herself these days to playing Lady Olivier in TV retrospectives but apparently she still totters along to auditions. She is eminently passable as the daffy widow who can't fathom why she commands so much attention.
Oliver Ford Davies has the most fun playing the lovable old cynic, Laudisi. With his long white mane tickling his ears, he strides up and down in his velvet slippers tossing back his head and barking out paradoxes. 'Facts?' he trumpets at top volume. 'What do you expect to learn from facts?' Or to punctuate a scene, he bellows out rhetorically. The truth? Ha!' and he fills the auditorium with great canyonroars of actorly laughter — a not unpleasing sound but one entirely alien to the natural repertoire of human communication.
I ended up feeling sorry for the actors. It was like watching bridge grandmasters forced to play snap. And it's possible they're in for a long haul. The mystifying success of An Inspector Calls suggests there is a great demand for the undemanding and this mechanical melodrama may well become a hit.
At Chelsea's Finborough Theatre there's a small but impressive production of Something Cloudy, Something Clear. This little-known play by Tennessee Williams contains a fascinating portrait of a writer on the verge of Broadway success. All of Williams's amazing talent is on display in this early work, his sense of poetry, his tender humour, and his seemingly endless ability to create vivid human beings and place them in compelling situations. Susan Bovell and Nikki Leigh Scott stand out in a cast skilfully directed by Tamara Harvey. A note of advice. The theatre is hot and dusty and smells of crab-paste and woodshavings. You will also have to suffer the nuisance of 'theatre in the round': one actor shouting in your ear while a second strikes an attitude with his groin two inches from your nose, and others prance around behind your back. Yes and great gobs of spittle landing in your hair. If you don't mind any of that you're in for a treat. Wear a toupe.
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