Theatre
Moss-covered
Ted Whitehead
Let the Good Stones Roll (Ambassador& Scissors (Almost Free) Let the Good Stones Roll is the sort of inelci revue you might admire at a fringe festi enjoying the accuracy of the imitations `'d the Stones' style and closing your eyes ears to the banality of the bits betweent,bl songs. And in fact the show was origine'ilii produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Fe°, in 1977. But given a full professional Il; duction at the Ambassadors it comes nv';r as a desperately inadequate tribute to thervi satanic majesties. Louis Selwyn, a passable look-alike for Jagger, raises t3-A hopes as he prances and flounces arotia", the stage in the opening number, `SymPatilto) for the Devil', screaming`Please.,,c1 meetchya — hope ya know my name'. "Int we do know his name, and we know
more about him and the rest of the gr°f than does Rayner Bourton, the author v
this revue. h Of Bourton presents the group as a ban-toe London innocents who picked up ad and a name from Muddy Waters alld became rock idols through the vigour the flash of their stage productions with toe help of some sensational publicitY. Hog charts the formation of the group in in 1960, the first hits, Brian's disillusion a rog death, Marianne singing 'It is the Evellind of the Day', Mick's marriage to Bianca, °to, the American tour. The scenes are Pune ated by performances of the Stones' songs (and five original songs by Steve Dawson). It's all bland, superficial, anaesthetised. I w.anted them to let the bad Stones roll. The ,‘Ital hedonism that upset the elders is tirely missing. It's this, surely, that made toe Stones so controversial — from the first challenge to the life of monogamous glottgage (`They just get married 'cos there's nothing else to do') through the tag-haunted songs (and not just Sister rttrPhine, but Mother's Little Helper, the ,11.11quilliser) to the provocative sexism of 1 ittch' and the parodic racism of 'Brown f "gar'. The power is still in the Stones — I p°11•11. €1 myself swept along by the chaotic :!eltement of the vast crowd at the last gig Earl's Court — but not in this mossel3Pered travesty. The group offer material 4ht least as dramatic as that of Elvis or The . ueatles, and it is a pity it hasn't been e. xPlored with the honesty and the force that It Merits. Tighneslast in the series of 'Rights and Camp.aplays at the Almost Free is a lunchproduction running just under an hour. "rtattsiso_ ors of Michelene Wandor is an explo eiv_enedt u. Jewish identity. It is a beautifully jurr,ceh piece of writing that probes pre 1 1 by a series of ironic f revelations. A 2wsish family of Russian origin, now living ZN.orth-east London, await the arrival of wic°_1, scl friend from America with news of the ii.l.c. _ sister, who vanished thirty years earh`i!_hen the airliner carrying the friend is eeNy ked, latent differences within the lam
are brought into the open. The father, a
' f,F,ful Patriarch and a man of intense Jewish :Ita (if only intermittent practice) immedi"dtelY blames Palestinian guerrillas, and :fends his Zionist sympathies against the bitacks of his daughter, who wants Israel to ee a Peaceful 'godless socialist Middle Eastern state'. The mother abjures politics and ' cittfines her attention to iirsonal and fam
4 personal
Problems. The situation is further corn,'" lekted by the arrival of a young Jewish Z4lot who has been beaten up at a political get.ettlIg. The family look after him, but the a'ttler is disturbed by such hard-line milit(lilt Zionism (in Stoke Newington); the ghter is too, of course, but she is even repelled by the student's intense gious misogyny. cin't, says a great deal for Michelene Wan0"t S talent that she can write in concrete, eti`;,ert humorous, detail about such abstract complex issues. It would weaken the il'e Pact of a tense and fascinating play to heal her final ironic revelations about Ca the hijackers and the vanished sister. trlit)11. gh to say that she faces up to the coniti:"Ictions implicit in any attempt to define as-ntitY in terms so shifting and amorphous I be rce, nation, culture or class. As the , 4 pldered student says at the end: 'Who is st,ew'? And yet for their little hour on the certainly Allan Corduner, Neil Gib/ It, Lesley Joseph, Barbara Lott and Jack , -inn 11, convince you that they are. Nicholas nrter's skilful production rounds off a last Valuable and topical season.
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