5 September 1976
n
alarming feature of theatregoing at this year's Edinburgh Festival has been
the close attention paid by Our Masters to those plays most pointfully commenting
on man and society. At the Birmingham
Rep's splendid production of Measure for Measure
. I was so placed that I could not fail to notice the concentration with
which the Prime Minister absorbed the machinations of the Duke of Vienna,
handing over government to o the fanatical Angelo, then disappearing to
lurk incognito around his vicious city.
Gripping though
the performance was, I could not dispel a frightful vision of Mr Callaghan
handing over power to Michael. Foot while nipping off disguised as a Civil
Servant (the untouchably authoritarian priest of today) to chuckle in dark
corners of the Corridors of Power.
Hardly less unnerving
the glee with which the Chancellor of the Exchequer responded to Ben Jonson's
exposure of humanity's innate greed, exploited by the first fine careless
rapture of the capitalist system, in The Devil is an Ass. In terms
of dramatic his glee was fully justified. Measure for Measure and
The Devil is an Ass, both directed by Stuart Burge, showed us comedy
at its best, morally incisive, theatrically exhilarating.
Although The
Devil is an Ass, even tidied up by Peter
Barnes is a lesser play than The Alchemist or Volpone,
we were given a performance of such spirit and invention that I quite forgot
I was watching a minor work by a past-master, and a not very sympathetic
one at that. Instant pleasure enhanced perception, and the events on the
stage seemed those of every day. (Had the Birmingham company performed their
plays in German, and announced themselves as coming from the Scheissenburg
Volksbuhne, no doubt our mildly surprised approval would have been transformed
into excited acclamation, their work used as a stick to beat run-of-the
mill theatres like the Birmingham' Rep.).
The play's diabolic framework, set up merely
to make the joke that human beings behave so that the Devil can teach them
nothing, hardly matters; but it enables Bernard Lloyd's Satan to launch
the proceedings stylishly, and Chris Ryan as an eager-beaver lesser devil
to cavort comically through the evening as a grotesque, incompetent Figaro
acrobatically hobbling round in ill-fitting stolen clothes, bubbling with
lust but far behind his terrestrial tormentors in wickedness and folly.
The latter is exemplified in this master, Fabian
Fitzdotterel, the embodiment of gullible possessiveness, yet strangely sympathetic
in Peter Vaughan's happy mixture of appetite and bewilderment. Battening
upon him, Russell Hunter's company promoter hawks what hindsight I can see
as perfectly sensible schemesfor the mechanical extraction of corks, for
example, or for draining the Fensunfurling a wild baroque enthusiasm, cavalier
in most senses of the word. Elizabeth Power's Lady Tailbush too, rapaciously.
projects, as she talks the women of the town into using her horrifying cosmetics,
those fearsome ladies of our own day who have filled the chemists' shops
with competitive unguents, the very blazon of the consumer society.
Among these and many. more crooks Anna Calder-Marshall
's Frances Fitzdotterel moves in a trance of dismay, wide-eyed yet shrinking
her virtue besieged by Wittipol a young gallant eventually converted by
her honesty; Alan Rickman (who made a marked impression in the quiet
manor role of Friar Peter in Measure for Measure) gave a fine beaky
grace to this sprig, and modulated most affectingly in the play's one lyric
passage, an exquisite flow of pastoral simile delivered with unaffected
musical precision.
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