Theatre
Red-hot
Ted Whitehead
Dingo (Warehouse) Laughter (Royal Court) Rose petals flutter down over the fallen as a voice intones: 'They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old . . .' And then a dead soldier pipes up and accuses Churchill and Montgomery of being responsible for his death; and another soldier accuses the warlords of chopping off his compassion, as he recalls an incident when he threw some Italian prisoners over a cliff to their death, And felt not a thing. Suddenly the soothing romanticism of Laurence Binyon is confronted with the appalled honesty of Wilfred Owen, who in 'Insensibility' ironically celebrated the erosion of feeling in war: 'Happy are those who . . . can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.'
To anyone who likes to think that the theatre marches ahead of current wisdom — or even keeps in step with it — it's an eyeopener that Charles Wood's Dingo, premiered at Bristol in 1967, was the first British play to treat war the way poets and novelists had been treating it for over fifty years, as a grotesque farce that degraded all its participants. The first scene sets the tone, as two soldiers listen to the agonised screams of a man trapped in a blazing tank and try to guess how long he'll last. Later they recover the corpse and argue about whether it is British or German; charred remains look much the same whatever the nationality.
It's a horrifying yet funny scene, brilliantly compressing both Wood's rage at the Insensibility' produced by war and his pity for the common humanity beneath the different uniforms. So who are the villains? Well, the officer class, certainly. An Indian servant bringing a tray to an officer is blown Up by a shell and literally vanishes; the Officer registers a brief irritation and then raps out, 'Bring me another cup of tea!' The generals and the politicians come across like Public schoolboys revelling in some monstrous game —with Montgomery demanding the chance to notch up a victory before the Yanks come in, and Churchill gloating as he Pisses over the ashes of Germany. But the real target is the romanticisation of war itself, as expressed in the heroic fantasies of the ruling class or in the sentimental banalities of popular poetry and song.
It's a sympathetic theme, and yet one has to ask: so why did we go to war? Wood is careful to point out that it wasn't due to our determination to prevent the Nazis carrying out their policy of mass murder and genocide, because we didn't know about that at the time. But he never examines the other reasons, the historical developments in capitalism and imperialism, that led to the conflict.
Nowadays, when every play or film about war treats the subject as a meaningless farce, I find myself longing for hard political analysis. But perhaps one should be content to salute Charles Wood's achievement in giving us the first play with a Tommy'seye-view of the war, expressed in a series of marvellously theatrical images and in a dialogue that turns military dialect into red-hot poetry. Ian McDiarmid beautifully controls the audience in the role of The Comic, and Richard Griffiths and Allan Hendrick stand out from an excellent cast in Barry Kyle's richly inventive production. bingo is obviously going to make it even more difficult to get a ticket for the Warehouse, where the RSC are having a magnificent season.
The only thing I can say with certainty about Peter Barnes's new play at the Royal Court, Laughter, is that there aren't a lot of laughs in it. It opens with a stand-up comic warning us that comedy anaesthetises the Moral sense. Is this our moral for the even ing? I don't know, because Barnes promptly has the comic given the custard-pie treat ment, and follows this with two different Plays. The first is about the cruelty of tyranny, as Ivan the Terrible rants and roars and commits several atrocities including jokes. The second is about the cruelty of bureaucracy, as a team of civil servants
Carry out clerical and administrative duties in the Third Reich while ignoring the fact that what they are administering are the concentration camps.
I have enjoyed Peter Barnes's adaptations, particularly of Wedekind and Fey
deau, so much that lam reluctant to say that he comes over as very laboured and pedantic in his own write. He has at least given his director, Charles Marowitz, the oppor
tunity to bring off some of his favoured Theatre of Cruelty effects, such as the man impaled on a stake driven up his anus and through his chest, and the alarming revelation of gas ovens. And there's a powerful performance by Timothy West as an overweening Nazi. But overall there's a sense of strain, in both the writing and the production. A pity, because on reflection I think the comic's opening assertion well worth exploring. (I've read nothing more revealing of the antipathy created by traditional sexual culture than the Rationale of Dirty Jokes.) But a sense of strain is fatal to the joker.
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