8 May 1977
he
National Theatre, possibly as their special contribution to the Silver Jubilee,
appear to have inaugurated Ben Jonson Bugger-the-Text Week; no doubt if
it is a success it will become a regular annual feature. A few days since,
we had the NT's own magnificent Volpone marred by feeble concessions
to the groundlings, modern words being substituted for many of Jonson's
ancient ones in case somebody in the audience might otherwise be obliged
to think. Now they are playing host in the Lyttelton, to the Birmingham
Repertory Company whose production of The Devil
Is an Ass adapted by Peter
Barnes goes a good deal further and fares a good
deal worse.
For not only has Mr Barnes
rewritten scores of lines"an act of common council "becomes "an
act of Parliament," "a middling gossip" becomes "a meddling
go-between," "fineness" becomes "finesse," "a
steam of brimstone" becomes a stink of brimstone," "the Commissioners"
becomes "the Monopoly Commissioners," "a common house"
becomes "a brothel house," "a moonling" becomes ''a
loony" but he has re-cast entire speeches, inserted scenes of his own,
including a jarring epilogue which badly distorts Jonson's conclusion, and
justified all this with a programme-note of sufficiently significant fatuousness
to make it worth quoting:
Adapting an old play is much like restoring an old painting. Time renders certain areas opaque and words like protecting varnish go dead.... These obsolete words have to be replaced by others of equal precision, beauty and force, but whose meaning is clear. The opaque areas have to be cut or retouched. I have added certain speeches and scenes in the interest of clarity.... The only question to ask is, is it true to the original, and is it theatrically alive?
Did you ever see such
a gallimaufry of fallacies? Why do "obsolete" words "have
to be" replaced, and why must "opaque areas" be "cut
and retouched"? Has Mr Barnes not entertained the possibility that
the opaque areas may be in his own brain, and the obsolescence in his belief
that audiences are no better educated than he? What work of genius would
be safe from this filleting and stuffing if anything not instantly familiar
to all "must be" removed and replaced? Does he not even realise
that the patina of an old painting is itself part of its beauty? Or that
writing pastiche isn not the same as being "true to the original,"
and that to suppose otherwise betrays a misunderstanding of the nature of
artiistic creation that disqualifieis him from so much as giving an opinion
on the matter? Or that he cannot replace Jonson's word's "by others
of equal precision, beauty and force," because Jonson chose words not
at random but to express himself? Or that "is it theatrically alive?"
is not the only question, for there is also the matter of integrity
to be considered? Or, finally, that Ben Jonson was perhaps this country's
greatest dramatist after Shakespeare, and that he would need no assistance
from Mr Barnes even if Mr Barnes were considerably better equipped to supply
it?
The first edition of
The Devil is an Ass appeared with a line of Horace for a motto: Ficta
voluptatis causa, sint proxima veris, which may be translated "if
fiction is to please, it must resemble truth." Mr Barnes will stay
in after curtainfall and write that out one hundred times.
All this is more of a
pity than you may suppose, for Stuart Burge's production of Mr Barnes's
mongrel work Is excels lent fun for those who know no better, such as the
other critics. Jonson's characters are all cards, and Mr Burge shuffles
the pack with speed, skill and an attractive imagination, this last at its
best in the scene in which the gallant is disguised as a Spanish lady who
gives lessons in etiquette, a transformation which also ripens Alan Rickman's
otherwise rather green performance. As the chief gull, Peter Vaughan inevitably
suffers by comparison with the previous week's magisterial assumption by
Gielgud of the equivalent part in Volpone; inevitably but unfairly,
for Mr Vaughan is richly and satisfyingly daft (with a name like Fabian
Fitzdotterel he'd better be). And as the chief sharper, Derek Godfrey has
a swagger that brightens the stage.
The Birmingham Rep have
also brought Measure for Measure, in which at any rate they speak
the tongue that Shakespeare spake. (Well, almost; "the prenzie"
Angelo becomes "the precise," but since the word, a hapax legomenon
with no known meaning, is almost certainly a First Folio misprint, Mr Burge's
guess is as good as those of the editors). It is one of the most difficult
plays in the canon, not only philosophically but structurally (the poetry
almost disappears towards the end, there is so much unravelling to get through),
and Mr Burge is to be congratulated on the clarity of his production, though
it is badly damaged by the absurd presentation of the Duke as a mincing
comic. (Bernard Lloyd is crisp and entertaining within the misconception,
despite a rash of false thees). David Burke's Angelo is very interesting;
not the usual drawn ascetic with banked fires beneath the ice, but more
worldly, even fleshly, from the start. David Suchet is a juicy Lucie, and
Roger Sloman an even juicier Pompey.
The future of the Old
Vic is still being debated, and will probably continue to be until the place
falls down; meanwhile, the Prospect Theatre are inquilines there until July.
Their season has opened with St. Joan (the only woman who ever managed
to wipe the smirk from Shaw's face), and when Eileen Atkins made her first
entry, afire with faith, irresistible with certainty and radiant with holiness,
I thought it was going to be the definitive version of our time, for us
to speak of as an older generation still speak of as an older generation
still speaks of Sybil Thorndike. It does not turn out so; though Miss Atkins
comes back strongly from the moment at the end of the trial when the doom
of perpetual imprisonment is pronounced (the slow dawning of realisation
is conveyed with great effect), it somehow falls away in the middle. At
her best, however, Miss Atkins is very remarkable indeed, so entirely subsumed
in the part that she ceases to be an actress, and becomes in very truth
the girl from Domremy and God; we can practically hear her voices ourselves.
I think Charles Kay is
the best Dauphin since Guinness; confident and snappish in his contempt
for those who bully him, and thus the more effective in his frustration
at being unable to resist their bullying. Robert Eddison's Inquisitor gets
the awful detachment, but misses some of the agony of watching a soul depart
for hell; some of the smaller parts are weakly cast, but Frederick Treves
is an excellent Baudricourt, and Dave Atkins, as the English soldier who
gives the burning saint, a cross, seizes with avidity and success the five
minutes that the cunning old Irish devil gives him. The epilogue is beautifully
produced, and Miss Atkins utters the famous last line with fresh and memorable
grace.
She has told us (in an
interview in The Guardian) that at an important crossroads in her
career she was urged towards what proved the right course of action by the
ghost of Godfrey Winn. Would that some similarly august and persuasive spectre
had warned Celia Johnson and Ralph Richardson against appearing in The Kingfisher
(Lyric), latest of William Douglas-Home's plays, for such a waste of such
talents I have rarely seen. The play tells of an aged author who for fifty
years has loved in vain, and who at last proposes to the lady on the day
of her husband's funeral. There is a beautiful set by Alan Tagg, but little
plot, less wit and no point. The director is Lindsay Anderson [sic].
Stephen Black's The
Pokey (Soho Poly lunchtime) is a two-hander, set in a Texas prison,
for a rock-star with brassy demeanour but golden heart and a shy jailer
anxious that she should recover from the binge that has landed her there
before starting the next one. It is a sentimental piece; all things in Texas
being bigger than elsewhere, it follows that the sentiment is greater, too.
But the play manages to make, gently, some sense about the unsymmetrical
way in which life distributes contentment.
Stop Press: I have just
noticed that for the RSC's production of Jonson's The Alchemist,
which opens in a fortnight, the codirector is Peter Barnes. If I find that
he has gelded that glorious work, too, I will do such things--what they
are yet I know not--but they shall be the terrors of the earth. Or, as Mr
Barnes may prefer, what they are I don't know at this moment in time, but
they will, hopefully, put him in an ongoing counter-productive situation.
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