Drama in the Edinburgh Festival

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1054, 6 November 1959, Page 9

Drama in the Edinburgh

Festival

by

D. M.

ANDERSON

.VERYONE was belly- ~ aching. This formal acknowledgment of an easily predictable state of affairs, endemic in the theatre, is intended only to clear the ground. Of course there were few good plays in the official programme of the festival, for two obvious reasons that no one mentioned. One is that, unlike the concerts, opera, ballet, and even films, the theatrical side of the festival is limited to Britain; a little French is allowed every third or fifth year, but other languages are not spoken here. The other, and more important, is that invitations to come to Edinburgh are issued so far in advance that they ean only go to standing companies: the Old Vic, the English Stage Com-

pany, the Birmingham, Dundee, and Perth Repertory Theatres being this year’s guests. Looking at the plays now running in London, with the hindsight denied to the management a year ago, there are some one would have liked to see, but not many. If Joan Plowright had been asked for a new production, we might have seen Arnold Wesker’s Roots at the festival, which would by all accounts have been more exciting than most of what we did see; but she is no doubt high on the list for next year, if she will come. For it.is the arrival on stage of the uppish classes, more or less detribalised and discontented, that furnishes most of the liveliness in the theatre these days. Other things are done, and done well. They are of great historical interest. But they have no vitality. Even (it grieves one to say it) Sean O’Casey’s

Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy left me feeling | that it was a fine Irish flogging, but a terribly dead horse. Some details of the | production accentuated this feeling. There is a demon cock, who is believed | in by the parish priest, the most pious of his flock, and a wandering zany; well | and good. There is a pretty and very mildly sexy girl, who is witch-hunted; still all is well. When the priest comes to exorcise her late dwelling, things are still credible. But when his entry into the building is followed by thunders, rocking walls, roofs that flap like lids, flashes of blue light, and puffs of smoke, we are in Disneyland. There are also | bottles of whisky that become red-hot | and glow within; the electricians have been most ingenious, but the play is stone dead. All this is led up to by a

whole act of Irish talk, | and perhaps the English Stage Company were not Irish enough there. More | exuberance might have | given us -the feel of | people liable to be car- | ried away by their own fantasies. As it is, one> sees O’Casey fighting with a comic and horrible monster, but one is not | convinced that it really exists. With Eric Linklater’s | new play, Breakspear in| Gascony, the question of | real existence does not) even arise. My own) opinion is that he was | trying to pull off the} trick that worked in The Lady’s Not for Burning -talking about the 14th century and saying things about the 20th. Other people, catching references to military science, manicheeism, the metaphysics of killing, and Lactantius, say he was (continued on page 26) |

Festival Drama

(continued from page 9) imitating Shaw. Unfortunately, he has neither the sparkle of the one nor the urgency of the other, although the latter might perhaps have been achieved if the producer had really taken the piece by the scruff of the neck. This is certainly what the Birmingham Repertory did with William Poel’s Victorian refurbishing of the German Ur-Hamlet, called Fratricide Punished. Lines and corpses fell flat with resounding thumps from beginning to end. It was very funny; and one was so relieved to be free of the feebleness of Gammer Gurton’s Needle, which came first in the same programme, that only afterwards did one stop to wonder whether it was worth doing. It was well enough done for the question to be arguable. To complete the record, the Old Vic did Congreve’s The Double Dealer, and the Dundee Rep. Bridie’s The Baikie Charivari. I did not get to either. There was also the modérnised version of Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaites, by Sir David Lindsay of the Mount; having been produced at three festivals in nine years-its first airing since 1594- it is now, I understand, being withdrawn for a generation or so. In a rather lordly review, Alan PryceJones lamented that so many perhaps good plays are performed more or less unheralded in church halls and similar places during the festival. He did not appear to have visited any of them, These productions vary from professionals to school dramatic societies, but there are one or two stable groups that come regularly. Outstanding among these is the Oxford Theatre Group-O.U.D.S. disguised to avoid proctorial attention. Last year it put on what has since been a West End success under the name of The Long and the Short and the Tall, a moying piece whose scope was better shown by its original title, The Disciplines of War. The year before, its production of Ugo Betti’s Corruption in the Palace of Justice spear-headéd an awakening of intefest in this sophisticated and penetrating writer. This year they are doing another new play. Called Why the Chicken? it is about some youths shifted to a New Town, a rather pretty youth club organiser, and an unimaginative town councillor. The plot is a naive matter of feminine jealousy-a cliché if ever one was-but the people are so crackling ‘with their own kind of life that the effect is quite stunning. The characterisation has its faults, and the Construction is awkward at the barony 9 but the play has enough life to carry these handicaps. Out of the pfimitive conventions of teddy-boys almost untouched by compulsory education, the author, John McGrath, has created people passionate and simplé énough to move the heart. This is the only festival play I expect to remetmber in three months’ time.