Theatre
Make 'em laugh
Kenneth Hurren
Comedians by Trevor Griffiths; Nottingham Playhouse production (Old Vic) Did you hear about the last request of the aristocratic Spanish guerrilla? He asked for a diamond choker.
This is not a joke that would appeal much, I suspect, to Trevor Griffiths, the author of Comedians Which is largely an investigation of comedy and the cruelty of it. Of course, it may not be terribly funny — being merely the best I can think of on the spur of the moment about garrotting, a procedure that does not tickle me immoderately — but, worse than that, it lacks a proper sense and degree of commitment.
At first glance it may seem of a Piece in tastelessness with the one about Christ nailed to the Cross and complaining that it's a hell of a way to spend Easter. (You'd be dead with that one at the church social, but pick the right audience and you've got a big laugh there.) The trouble with the garrotting gag, though, is that there isn't a 'right' audience. The left-wing anti-fascists would enjoy a joke about the garrotte, since it would illuminate the barbarity of the regime; but the fact that the victim is 'aristocratic' takes the bite out of the comment, and at the same time those of the opposite political persuasion don't laugh either, because for them a joke about the death of a guerrilla loses its savour when the guerrilla in question is not the standard scruffy revolutionary. The joke breaks the rules of commitment. You don't know where you are with it, and this is what I think would ruin it for Griffiths. It may also explain why I am bothered by his play which, if I understand it aright, argues that the performer's commitment — social or political or both — is more important than his humour. Stop me, if you've heard it, but I'll take the received notion that a comedian who isn't funny is no comedian. .
This is probably to be pretty hard on the principal personnel of Comedians, which comes to town from the Nottingham Playhouse under the auspices of the National Theatre. Assembled for what is apparently an adult education evening class for aspiring comedians under the tutelage of Eddie Waters, a veteran professional (Jimmy Jewel, typecast and brilliant), are a carefully arranged cross-section of music hall types: a couple of Irishmen (one from the Republic, one from Ulster), a couple of Englishmen with a doubleact, a Jew and one whom I took by his name, Gethin James, to be, presumably like Griffiths himself, of Welsh stock. None of them struck me as especially amusing as entertainers (which is evidently Griffith's intention, for the amusing lines in the play are reserved for the moments when they are not doing their comedian material), but one of them, this Gethin James, is committed right down to his socks.
It is the end of the course for the six apprentices, the night they are to be thrust before an audience, providing an interlude between bingo sessions at a Lancashire working-men's club and being judged by a London booking agent, Bert Challenor, like their instructor a retired professional. They meet Bert before the show and are disconcerted to learn that his idea of the ideal comic is someone like Max Bygraves. Two of the hopefuls accordingly amend their acts ('compromise' I suppose would be the word for such commercialism) and Bert signs them up. I was interested to see that the Guardian man, Michael Billington, said that Bert "epitomises the modern subservience to the audience," a phrase he clearly used pejoratively and I am sure he was interpreting the playwright absolutely accurately; the kick is in the word 'modern' with its implication that for a comedian to go out there and tell people the sort of jokes that make them laugh is something new and tiresome. I am not sure whether Griffiths and Billington regret comedians, or whether they just wish the Arts Council would rescue them from this awful 'situation in which they have to entertain people to make a living.
The play correctly theorises that a great deal of comedy is based on other people's misadventures and misfortunes, stresses and pains, and that it often involves playing shamelessly on prejudice in jokes about, say, priests or immigrants or Jews. All this Griffiths deplores; which makes it the more confusing when he appears ultimately to identify not with Eddie Waters (who settles at the end for the traditional mocking prejudices that sustain his craft), but with the manic and anarchic Gethin James, who elevated his own prejudices above those of the audience and extends them into hate. His bingohall performance, aggressive„ bitter, splenetic, is a disaster. What we are to assume redeems him is that he is, at least, uncompromisingly true to himself. One man's truth, though, is often only prejudice in disguise. The old gag about the black man on the zebra crossing — "now you see him, now you don't" — insofar as it is true at all, should be equally true of a white man, but it is, of course, only funny, insofar as it is funny, because of the racial feelings, however mild, of the audience to whom it is told. There may be something to be said for the view that a comedian's first duty is to his material rather than his audience, but that rather leaves out of consideration the business he is in, and the crucial fact about Gethin James — in an act which is hysterical in its commitment to his own truth or prejudices — is that he is never funny. He is not funny for that audience, and he is not funny for the audience watching the play. At the risk of offending the Guardian man, he could use a little subservience.
Griffiths ,himself, after all, is not above exploiting, or at least calculating, his audiences' prejudices. How else would he hope to entertain them? That Max Bygraves sneer would. die at the Victoria Palace, but the folks at the Nottingham Playhouse and the Old Vic know just what's expected of superior intellects like theirs and they come up, on cue, with the right
response, They are also remarkably tolerant of the protracted scene at the, bingo club, which is like Opportunity Knocks on an off night, and in which all I found to admire was the amazing expertise of the actors in demonstrating just how ghastly those embryonic comics are.
The performance of the piece is, indeed, impeccable throughout under Richard Eyre's inspired direction. In addition to Jimmy Jewel's magnificent study of the instructor (which goes far beyond mere self-portraiture), there is a ferociously dedicated and arrestingly detailed performance by Jonathan Pryce as Gethin, and I should be surprised if the supporting contributions — by Jim Norton, Stephen Rea, Louis Raynes, Dave Hill and James Warrior as the other students, Ralph Nossek as the agent, and John Joyce, Richard Simpson and Talat Hussain in other parts — fell short in the smallest measure of what the author, whose characterisation in every case is brilliant, had in mind.
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