Pick of the London Season

By Christopher Porterfield

Traditionally a parched period for Broadway, summer is the most fertile time of year for the London stage. American tourists crowd the city and producers pump new life into old attractions and unveil choice new ones. The most successful plays usually migrate to the U.S. Following is a current British sampler:

A Proper Despair

Palm fronds hang listlessly overhead. A houseboy insolently serves up rum to old colonials. The veranda glares in the kind of heat that rots wood and souls.

A promisingly seedy setting for John Osborne's latest play, which opened last week to culminate the London summer season. The locale and title are West of Suez--a former British outpost in the Caribbean, now underrun by surly native administrators and overrun by American tourists. Four English sisters, their spouses and assorted hangers-on have gathered at a villa for a holiday with the sisters' father, an aging, eminent writer (Ralph Richardson). The whole crowd is psychologically on the lam, morally lying low, parceling out a diminishing stock of options while they keep a furtive lookout for some dreaded future that is already rounding the corner.

The Gravest Sin. This, Osborne seems to be saying, is what England has come to. These are the people whom Jimmy Porter savaged so mercilessly as the detritus of a doomed civilization in Osborne's first play, Look Back in Anger (1956). But now Osborne, who has shifted to the right in recent years, finds much to mourn in that civilization's passing. The bright, bitchy banter of the sisters--one notably played by Jill Ben nett (Mrs. John Osborne)--is pierced by nostalgia when the old writer reminisces about damp England, colonial days, his own youth when he never really felt young. The latter-day equivalent of Jimmy Porter, a visiting American hippie, can only splutter four-letter words in return, the abstract tokens of a rage that is blind and almost dumb.

It is pointless to worry about whether Suez is a shapely and coherent play. It isn't. Useless characters clutter the stage, scenes balloon or shrink out of proportion, and at the final curtain the plot snaps shut arbitrarily as native soldiers run onstage shooting. Osborne's anger still glints and cuts, but it cannot draw blood from such straw men as critics, in-laws and American tourists.

What redeems the play is what redeems any Osborne play: an intriguing central character who rivets the audience with nothing more than talk, talk and more talk. This time it is the roguish writer, a part that Richardson does not so much perform as revel in --gloriously. Behind his screen of "Who, me?" buffoonery, the writer has plumbed the cold depths of his situation. The other characters--old generation and new--are still in the shallows, still fashionably suffering a loss of faith as if it were a briefcase left on a train. To the writer, the gravest sin is to lack "the capacity for proper despair." He has it. Between the time the play lurches fitfully into motion and the time it explodes raggedly at the end, his expression of that despair--funny, shrewd, somber--holds the stage compellingly.

Merciful Lies

English acting boasts six superweapons: Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Paul Scofield, Michael Redgrave and Alec Guinness. Producers usually have two or three of them deployed at any given moment, much as the U.S. Strategic Air Command keeps some bombers in the air at all times. This summer all but Olivier are aloft. The effect, allowing for an occasional misfire, is explosive.

Besides Richardson in the Osborne play, there is Gielgud, rendering nobly unto the part of Caesar in the Chichester Festival production of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. Redgrave, the one current dud, is tentative and shambling as a man who has never outgrown his school days in William Trevor's The Old Boys. Scofield virtually carries Pirandello's The Rules of the Game with his icily commanding portrayal of a cynical philosopher.

The best performance is by Guinness in A Voyage Round My Father. His role --that of a blind, eccentric barrister who insists on living life as if he can see --calls for a tour de force, and Guinness amply provides it. The rather slender script is not so much a play as a dramatic memoir. Playwright-Barrister John Mortimer based it on the life of his father and achieves a remarkably clear-headed perspective: comic but not patronizing, critical but not contemptuous, affectionate but not sentimental.

Final Triumph. Guinness builds a crafty surface portrait, all devastating sarcasm in the courtroom and gruff charm at home. The physical details are uncannily convincing, from the willed confidence of his stride to the panicky flutter of his hand when he gropes for his cane. The father leans heavily on a long-suffering family yet dismisses love as "overrated." His life and feelings are arranged, like his face, into a mask: cunning, stoic, blank.

The challenge of the portrayal is to reveal the price of maintaining that mask.

Guinness's jaunty lines echo with desolation. Sagging visibly into senility, he gradually allows the subterranean fear and loneliness to seep through. When his new daughter-in-law assures him that he isn't dying, he says: "I'm so relieved to find that you can lie as mercifully as anybody else."The final triumph of this scrupulous and touching performance is to suggest that the man who knows what lies he has lived by has attained a kind of truth.

Foam on the Wave "Revolutions," said American Abolitionist Wendell Phillips, "are not made: they come." When they come, they sweep up or crush the rebels themselves.

That collision of personal destinies and impersonal forces contains the stuff of drama, and two of the most engrossing current plays make the most of it. The National Theater production of Georg Buchner's Danton's Death and the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Maxim Gorky's Enemies both show how historical drama can be elevated to the real drama of history.

Buchner, a German medical student with radical leanings, wrote Danton's Death in 1835, when he was 22 and had only two years to live. In the struggle between Danton, the dispirited French revolutionary leader, and Robespierre, the fanatical moralist of the terror, Buchner saw a vindication of his thesis that "the individual is foam on the wave, greatness nothing but chance." His dramaturgy marches in the lockstep of historical process, with rhetorical set piece piled upon set piece. Most directors try to flesh out the skeletal mechanism. At the National Theater, Jonathan Miller has daringly stressed the play's essential starkness, making it as cool and implacable as the guillotine's edge.

Pale Makeup. Miller's version sometimes seems more like an eerie dream than a real performance. Behind the players there is a haunting set by Patrick Robertson: two angled tiers on which stand rows of headless dummies. It is a gallery of the dead, where Danton, Robespierre, everyone is soon to take his place. The actors perform in pale makeup, gesturing stiffly. In a sense they are already dead, the puppets of history. Their futility makes Richard Kay's Robespierre and Ronald Pickup's Saint-Just all the more chilling in their bloodless passion. Christopher Plummer's Danton is all the more poignant for his earthy humanism.

Gorky's Enemies, written in 1906, is, like a Chekhov play, invaded by refugees from the playwright's own lower depths. All the familiar elements are there: the provincial country estate glimpsed through elegiac shadows, the large landowning family dwindling into folly and fecklessness, the enduring peasants. But this time the emerging new order, instead of being prophesied by some impotent Chekhovian visionary, actually spills over the stage, embodied in the rebellious workers from a factory near the estate. They shoot their employer, the Czarist police crack down, and at the final blackout a voice is heard amid the tumult: "These people are going to win, you know."

David Jones' Royal Shakespeare Company production--leisurely, expansive, lovingly detailed--is a Russian novel come to life. Under its spell, it hardly matters that Gorky's play is as rambling and sometimes as confused as the house in which it takes place. Nor is Gorky's propaganda allowed to blunt his keen human sympathies. Throughout, the real tragedy is that the enemies of the title are not only classes, but individuals.

Christopher Porterfield

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