Fresh Air
The Winter’s Tale /Riffs on Shakespeare
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer
George Farquhar’s The Twin Rivals, (Other Place, Stratford) is widely regarded as a turning-point in English comedy.
Its place in the story depends on its morality, a new commodity in the theatre at the time of its premiere in 1702, introduced, according to Farquhar’s own whimsical preface, in response to the clean-up campaign of Jeremy Collier, the Mary Whitehoise of his day.
Farquhar’s subsequent comedies commended themselves to Victorian critics for having country settings, letting breaths of fresh air into the fetid confines of Restoration comedy, that kind of thing. The London locale of The Twin Rivals is of the fetidest, but the sages excused this and commended Farquhar for his plotting: pitting a good brother against a bad, he leaves us in no doubt which is which and ensures the the good comes out on top. Bravo.
All this of course was a long time ago. For us, Farquhar’s morality merely heralds the descent of comedy into sentimentality. But to herald a descent is not necessarily to exemplify it, and The Twin Rivals seems the product of a brief but fortunate moment. We only feel cheated when a particularly reptilian villain, specializing in rape and rapier, turns Christian gentleman and repents.
Fortunately he is only a minor monster, and the major one makes no such blunders. This is Benjamin Would be, who suffers socially and financially from being both a younger brother (by about half an hour) and a hunchback. When his father dies, he manages to grab the estate by the quaint expedient of forcing a forged will between the old gentleman’s teeth. Mike Gwilym play very artfully with our sympathies throughout the evening.
More surprising, perhaps, is the solid success of Miles Anderson as his respectable sibling, who wears spectacles with an air that guarantees virtue, and who loses them at the height of the moist riotous stage duel (arranged by Malcolm Ranson) I have ever seen. Miriam Karlin is strong and entertaining as a bawd and procuress (helping them, so to speak, both in and out) and there are performances by Paul Shelley and Harriet Walter that fastidiously avoid period cliche.
The fleet direction is by John Caird, hitherto a rather shadowy figure (I never knew you, Caird), but now apparently his own man. He is much helped by his designer, Ultz, whose fantastic white costumes (the characters tend to resemble birds - of prey, passage or paradise - while Mr Gwilym in triumph takes to wearing frocks) reinforce the port that one man’s puritanism is another’s decadence; and by his author. Marvellously funny, an actor’s delight.
Stratford’s main theatre offers an enjoyable but skeletal version of The Winter’s Tale. Patrick Stewart’s Leontes flashes a terrifying smile. There is a cruel humour even in his worst rages. In repentance this becomes a moving performance and it is always a formidably accomplished one, but in Ronald Eyre’s production Leontes never seems dangerous to anyone except himself. A crying baby is an excellent human touch that helps to place Leontes jealousy and to link the play’s two worlds.
There is a similar reality in Sheila Hancock’s Paulina, who begins carefully comic, patronizing everybody, and goes on to thrilling defiance and magical resignation. Other welcome arrivals are Gemma Jones as Hermione and, as old lord and chorus, the infallible Robert Eddison. The Bohemian scenes are jollied up by Stephen Oliver’s pastiche Victorian tunes, vivaciously delivered by Geoffrey Hutchings, whose Autolycus arrives to shear the shepherd looking like John Wellington Wells (dealer in magic and spells) and behaving like a hopeful audition for Barnum.
The RSC is obviously the right company to stage a play called Thirteenth Night (Warehouse), though Howard Brenton’s title turns out to be kidding. His real model is Macbeth, with a rabble-rousing touch of Julius Caesar. A socialist politician dreams of himself as an initially high-minded dictator, ascending to power by murdering his Prime Minister, egged on by a fanatical girlfriend and three black-clad female activists who live in a multi-storey car-park. Later he progresses to murdering his colleagues or, when they are unavailable, their families.
Sometimes, as when the protagonist hysterically contemplates his axeman’s hands, Mr Brenton invests his pastiche with considerable power. But the game palls; e find ourselves anticipating the parallels, and when Banquo’s ghost turns out to be the visiting ambassador from Chad (‘why aren’t you black? ‘ asks the haunted one), it becomes a bit of a joke. The dream and Macbeth devices should in theory reinforce each other; in fact they cancel each other out. And, echoes apart, the progress of tyranny is predicable.
Most of us have already had this nightmare; Mr Brenton, having it - at least as far as his plays are concerned- for the first time, overrates its freshness- though sometimes, as when a character discovers and proclaims the idea of evil, you can hear a dramatist’s mind moving. Michael Pennington strikes attitudes sonorously and energetically; Domini Blythe makes him a chilling mate; and he has an excellent posse of victims, including Derek Godfrey, Paul Webster and - a juvenile lead unrecognizable in glasses and slicked-down hair- John Bowe.
However portentous it becomes, Mr Brenton’s play survives on narrative energy, a virtue he shares with Edward Bond and - surprisingly- John Galsworthy. The Skin Game (on tour at the Ashcroft, Croydon) is full of bloodless Edwardian slang. Set in 1920, it must have seemed quaint event then; not for nothing it its first gentleman named Dodo. The no-gloves fight he wages against an intrusive entrepreneur has lost all its urgency; all this careful marshalling of issues is now self-defeating. The gentry are obvious snobs; the arriviste plainly our man- Anthony Quayle, bruised and thrusting, gives the only live performance of the evening. Bust still I wanted to know what happened next, even while suspecting that I would be disappointed when it did.
During the interval of The Misanthrope (Roundhouse) the pundits were disputing the merits of Richard Wilbur’s coupleted translation. I thought them snappy- the couplets not the pundits. But really one couldn’t just, since the cast murdered the metre and hid the rhymes. Nicholas Amer as the maitre d’ is an exception, but his duties are confined to announcing people.
Second best is Tom Courtenay, whose bleating Alceste charts a careful but rapid decline from honest protestant to cry-baby clown. I missed the depths of enraged masochism that Alec McCowen discovered I the role, but maybe he was importing that English complexities into a glass-smooth French classic. (Why doesn’t somebody revive The Plain Dealer, stolen- and complicated - by Wycherlev from this play?) Other performances vary from dull to deplorable.
One Woman Plays - four of them- by Dario Fo and his wife Franca Rame (Cottesloe) are very entertaining, considering they are all monologues of female complaint. Yvonne Bryceland, delivering them, displays unexpected comic flair. But her conception of comedy unfortunately pushes her towards silliness, which is already inherent in the script. In the main segment she plays a woman locked in her flat by her husband with a crippled brother-in-law, a baby, a heavy breather and a peeping Tom. She refuses to let her lover release her; preferring to wreak vengeance for her confinement with a shotgun on all but the baby. The last omission is rectified in the last playlet, in which Miss Bryceland plays Medea.