7 September 1976
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of the joys of theatre festivals is the unexpected illumination that can
come from seeing two plays suddenly contrasted in such a way that their
subjects or themes connect or collide. A happy fluke of timing brought together
a very odd couple of plays at Edinburgh last week when Ben Jonson's great,
primal assault on avaricious proto-capitalists, The Devil is an Ass,
appeared in a rousing Birmingham
Repertory Company production, and the much lauded
La Mama production of Bertolt Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan
was added to the season of plays directed by Andrei Serban.
Good and evil is the
subject of both parables, and Jonson's early dramatic binding of lechery
and the profit-motive into a force malignant enough to cause the devil envy
has ample echoes in Brecht's tale of Shen-Te, the woman given money by three
gods in honour of her goodness who must invent a wicked cousin in order
to keep the gift in this greedy world.
When the devil,
in Peter Barnes's adaptation
of Jonson's play, abandons the earth as being hell enough without him, it
is much the same statement that Brecht's Chinese gods make when they turn
blind eyes to the social pressures that force Shen-Te to disguise herself
as her evil cousin.
But Brecht goes further. He emphasizes the
material motivations and suggests that the world can be changed, that goodness
is a quality which will flourish in a just society. Mr Serban dutifully
points up that political idea, bringing the entire cast on at the end to
pose the suggestion through song.
Mr Serban jettisons the music by Paul Dessau
with new music by Elizabeth Swados, offering sung speeches, choral support
for dialogue and intermezzos instead of intermissions. A lot of the music
is interesting and well-judged to the translation, with tonal suggestions
of the Orient and percussive accent to the action though it dips occasionally
into Hongkong honkey-tonk. But the trick of supplying extra singers for
the songs and putting them a beat or half-beat behind the principal singer
leads as often to cacophony as to revelation.
Priscilla Smith presents the feminine, sympathetic
half of Shen-Te as an innocent so winning and soft that it is hard to credit
her with the resolve to pretend to be the harsh cousin. Yet the strength
of her portrayal is the transformation, achieved with a hat, a half-mask,
and a cigar.
The problem is that her brilliantly enacted
dichotomy between "good woman" and "bad man" blurs an
essential irony. Part of the fault here, as elsewhere in the production,
lies in Eric Bentley's translation: where the German title has "good
person," he has made it "good woman." If Bentley's title
is enacted literally, as in Miss Smith's performance, the bad man has no
way of evolving from Shen-Te; the divided character can then be seen only
as a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure, not as one person torn in two by social forces.
That is Brecht simplified. For all the cleverness
with which it is staged--behind sliding paper screens and across an extremely
wide stage--and for all the genuine pleasure given by an energetic and congenial
company, it is much less than it should be, and far too cosy.
A certain bitterness is also missing from the
production of the Jonson play, but it can be taken simply as a satire, and
one not inappropriate today. Mr Barnes's adaptation has given the play a
slightly more modern accent and the cast, speaking the rich language with
grace and clarity, make the conventions--as of devils with horns and tails,
men disguised as women--seem natural.
If Stuart Burge's staging is too relentlessly
symmetric, it is always clear. If it is unashamedly a popularization, it
is deservedly popular. And the plays' greatest success is in its inspired
casting. Chris Ryan as the inept lesser devil, Alan Rickman as
the seducer, Russell Hunter, Anna Calder-Marshall and Peter Vaughan all
deserve the highest praise.
A production such as this is rare, as are any
productions of Jonson's plays. If only the manifest success here (and credit
must go to the festival for commissioning it) could inspire more London
productions, we should all benefit.
On the fringe it is an expansive, if not particularly
good, season for the Traverse, which is running two theatres. Richard Crane,
once again dazzles and dissatisfies with his play for the Traverse, Nero
and the Golden House. In Chris Parr's sympathetic production, it offers
a rehearsal and performance of the fall of Nero's Rome and the spectacle
of three Christian martyrs swapping reminiscences of Christ as they dangle
from crosses over the stage.
Also at the Traverse was a particularly vile
and ill-considered production of Howard Barker's malevolent play Wax,
which for some reason, opens today in London. Mr Barker tells the story
of a NATO general who achieves an erection for the first time in 40 years,
displays it to the audience, rapes his niece, and lets the NATO exercise
he is commanding get, as they say, out of hand. There are indications that
satirical political points were in Mr Barker's mind when he wrote the play,
but the effect is exploitive and demeaning, and it is odd that he was not
able to see that.
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