The Player's the Thing

By Christopher Porferfield

"The strongest fascination at a theater," wrote George Bernard Shaw of the 1894 London season, "is the fascination of the actor or actress, not of the author." That is still true today. An avid London public, augmented by swarms of tourists, is currently supporting 35 theaters in the West End alone, and in most cases, the player, not the play, is the thing. Considering the high caliber of English acting, this may not be so bad. But, as Shaw also pointed out, it does tend to shortchange the drama in favor of the theater.

In only two offerings of the current London theater do script and staging mesh at a truly first-rate level: Ingmar Bergman's production of Hedda Gabler and Jonathan Miller's of The Merchant of Venice, both for the National Theater. Yet even these are star vehicles, Hedda for Maggie Smith, and Merchant for Laurence Olivier as Shylock (at least until recently when a thrombosis forced him off the stage for three months). In most of London's other notable productions, playwrights and directors more or less suffer stellar eclipses.

Living Textbooks. What is locally being called the John Gielgud-Ralph Richardson play is not, of course, written by those two distinguished performers. It is simply a play in which they so dominate that contributions by other hands are hopelessly swamped. It is Home, a wry, rather thin portrayal of a group of crotchety elders in what turns out to be a mental institution, written by David Storey (whose other current London play, The Contractor, gives emphatic proof that his gifts are not always going to be swamped). As two inmates in the twilight of sanity and senility, Gielgud and Richardson are living textbooks of stagecraft, distilling decades of experience into the flourish of a cane, the fumbling of a card trick, the crack of a voice. Their reading of a passage like the following raises tiny lyrical fragments to a level of Mozartean serenity.

Richardson: Shouldn't wonder he's disappointed.

Gielgud: Oh, yes.

Richardson: Heartbreak.

Gielgud: Oh, yes.

Richardson: Same mistake . . . won't make it twice.

Gielgud: Oh, no.

The Philanthropist, produced by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theater, opens literally with a bang. A young playwright blows his brains out in the lodgings of a philologist. Then it settles down into a satirical, searching account of the philologist's quest for some spiritual anagram for happiness. Such ups and downs occur throughout the play. The ups are sufficiently impressive that it is hard to believe that the author, Christopher Hampton, is only 24. Yet it remains for a leading actor, Alec McCowen, to lift the production as a whole onto a plane of compelling theater.

McCowen's philanthropist is a companion to Moliere's misanthrope. Just as his philology leads him to like all words, regardless of meaning, his philanthropy leads him to like all people, regardless of individuality. In McCowen's characterization, the eager grin fades into a rictus of terror that others may not like him; the mildness is a mask for inadequacy. He is so nice that it hurts--himself and everyone around him.

Triumphant Return. Gielgud, Richardson, McCowen--these are the cream of England's classical stage. What about something for the groundlings? Diana Dors, the British cinema's answer to Marilyn Monroe in the '50s, is just the thing. Now 38, beaming broadly and broad of beam, she is triumphantly back as a slangy slattern in Donald Howarth's Three Months Gone. Miss Dors reveals almost the only thing she didn't reveal in her old films: talent. Zestfully vulgar without being camp, she turns out to have the kind of canny comic timing that cannot be learned at the Royal Academy. With all respect for her accomplished costar, Jill Bennett, Dors' performance is the best reason for seeing this diffuse fantasy-comedy.

Sometimes, alas, even superior acting is not enough. Despite strong portrayals by the Royal Shakespeare Company's Peggy Ashcroft and Emrys James, German Novelist Guenter Grass's The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising falls as flat as the uprising it describes. Set during the 1953 workers' revolt in East Berlin, it shows a theater troupe rehearsing Shakespeare's Coriolanus under the direction of an aging radical writer who may or may not be Bertolt Brecht. When the revolt erupts in the streets, the writer hesitates over which drama is more real, and as a result ends up bitterly playing a role dictated by the state. It is a challenging idea for a play, but it probably would take another Coriolanus to live up to it. Grass's action dissolves in implausibilities, and his dialogue stiffens all too often into rhetoric. His is a problem play that is almost all problem and very little play.

Nevertheless, even a misfire like The Plebeians can serve as a reminder of what is largely missing from the London stage nowadays. After all, the play touches fundamental issues. Its opening scenes crackle with intellectual energy. Its rehearsal framework and plays-with-in-plays probe fresh possibilities of form. More productions will have to take on its spirit if Britain's playwrights and directors are to regain their equity in theater's traditional triumvirate. Meantime, like old troupers who can go out and mesmerize the house while some lapse is dealt with backstage, the stars blaze on.

. Christopher Porterfield

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