UNLUCKY JIM AND BABY DOLL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 923, 18 April 1957, Page 12

UNLUCKY JIM AND BABY DOLL

LOOK BACK IN ANGER, a play by John Osborne; Faber and English price 10/6. BABY DOLL, by Tennessee Wiiyr Secker and N.Z. price

‘(Reviewed by

Bruce

Mason

]N the second act of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams, there occurs a crucial scene between Big Daddy and his son Brick. Brick’s marriage has foundered; he refuses to Tecognise his wife sexually, and Big Daddy asks him why. Brick finally comes out with an explanatior, but Williams warns the reader in an author’s aside, that this may not be the whole truth at all, nor even perhaps a part of it; the real reasons, he infers, are much deeper and more obscure. No such reticence guides the author of Look Back in Anger, the most controversial, certainly the best, play of the 1956 London season, Again in Act II, Jimmy Porter, after an hour of eloquent invective against the world, his wife, class and culture, comes out with his explanation. It is because as a boy he saw his father, wounded in the Spanish war, suffer a lingering death, neglected by his relations, and if his life had any meaning, it was ignored. Jimmy keeps his father’s memory alive by fury. Beside that shattering and destructive reality, he cannot be-

lieve in anything, and conducts a solo vendetta of great force and viciousness against a shoddy world.’ He finds in the general seediness of the times no creative vessel into which his energies can be poured, and so contained, and he erupts like a volcano, shooting

sparks, lava and scoria over the people he shares his life with, searing them all. So far, splendid. I was right with him. But when the Spanish war intervened through the image of the dead father, I felt a sudden slackening of interest. Jimmy Porter, instead of resting content as the liveliest dramatic character on the English stage since the early O’Casey, turns into an explicit symbol of his times, and forfeits at once a large slice of his humanity. How much stronger it would have been, how much more symbolical, if there had been no father dying neglected after an idealistic commitment. Symbols surely can only be implied: it is the persons of the drama we come to see, and symbolism can never be forced on you, or you are left merely with symbols, and not what they stand for. Look Back in Anger is, nevertheless, a major play, and Jimmy Porter the fiercest, richest, most unpleasant, most human character to appear on the English stage since the war. Like all powerful creations, he has a life that reverberates far outside the printed text or the lighted stage. He seems to summarise in his savage resentments, bewilderments, cruelties and agonies, and in his plain, obstinate cussedness, the whole generation reared on the sudden broadening of intellectual horizons which the Welfare State has made possible. No Member of Parliament should fail to strike up an acquaintance with

Jimmy Porter, however distasteful the prospect, for he has not yet been considered by legislation, and if we are to sleep calmly in the future, he must be. He is unique in modern dramatic literature in combining in his nature the sex war, and the cla’ war, and this is an achievement which, to my knowledge, no other playwright has brought off. My final:injunctions are to readers: buy or borrow it at once, and to University dramatic groups particularly, an urgent plea to make it their next major production. Baby Doll is the published script of Tennessee Williams’s controversial film, whose commercial success has recently been assured by ecclesiastical trumpetings in, America. It reads astonishingly well: the effect, with its rapidly changing scenes. is of a novel of great vividness. It is set in what I will call Williams County; the steamy south, graft and chicanery among the poor and not-so-poor whites, and in the centre of it all, like Dickens’s child-wife in David Copperfield, Baby Doll, plump, child-like, and, as they will doubtless say in the film publicity, ripe for love. The action moves forward with that professional smoothness that we can expect of a craftsman as accomplished as Tennessee Williams, The film sings its sweet-sour song of the south in those cracked chords Williams knows so well how to pluck, and you can feel the landscape as clearly as the characters, But the effect on me, reading it, was finally

one of thinness. Though they are real -acutely, humorously and wisely ob-served-they create no reverberations outside thamselves, and compared with the vitality of the people in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Look Back in Anger, they are insubstantial. And I found the end, where Baby Doll, and her lover, Vacarro, hide in a tree, while the demented husband, Archie Lee, mad with thwarted. passion, shoots out blindly and kills Baby Doll’s crazy old aunt, heartless and pointless. If it is decadent, I find it here, though nat elsewhere. It will be interesting to see whether the film with its greater visual impact will confirm or modify these impressions.