Comparative Drama

High Tide in the London Theatre: Some Notes on the 1978-79 Season J. L. Styan The infinite riches of the English theatre make rather a mockery of this kind of note-taking, and I write in so healthy a context of good plays and honest productions that it is hard not to sound a little intoxicated. Hardly a period of major drama has passed unnoticed on the London stage during the 1978-79 season. There have been delightful glimpses of the Restoration in the neglected Etherege of She Would If She Could and the Congreve of The Double Dealer—the latter revealing a broad and lubricious comic talent in the divine Dorothy Tutin as a purring Lady Plyant. The “realism” of Ibsen and Shaw was revisited with a rare Lady from the Sea, which sported a pas­ sionately emoting Vanessa Redgrave entirely surrounded by fjord water in the Round House, and a late Shavian Millionairess and an early Shavian Philanderer (it was his second play) in which the new sexual Ibsenism becomes an egotistic joke for Dinsdale Landen as Leonard Charteris doing his worst in the sardonic world of the new woman. The period was also repre­ sented by a powerful revival of Galsworthy’s Strife, complete with on-stage blast-furnace: the whole show was made strangely symbolic when a strike of scene-shifters left the players without chairs in the limbo of the large stage of the new Olivier Theatre. The history of the American theatre was encapsulated tidily in four plays. An original revival by the Royal Shakespeare Company of Bronson Howard’s 1870 farcical comedy of man­ ners Saratoga was chosen, like London Assurance and Wild Oats in previous seasons, in order to celebrate the virtues of our past repertory; the play’s joyous subtitle, “Pistols for Seven,” hints at its multiple climax of amorous endeavors. O’Neill’s still seaworthy one-acters were nicely run together under the title 252 /. L. Styan 253 The Long Voyage Home at the Cottesloe studio of the National Theatre, with half the space given over to the deck of the S. S. Glencaim, gently rolling under the moon of the Caribbees. Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré, which had not been too well received in New York, found a happier home in London. Wil­ liams’ wryly humorous returns to the New Orleans of his early obsessions in order to revisit his ghosts—lonely outcasts, genteel prostitutes, fierce rooming-house keepers, and the like—were treated nostalgically, and with an artistic sense of detachment that could not be faulted. But it was Chicago’s David Mamet and his ear for the speech rhythms of the urban mid-west in American Buffalo which most effectively captured contemporary American drama. It has been Thomas Middleton’s year, resuming his rightful place as one of our best Jacobeans. Middleton and Rowley’s A Fair Quarrel was a virtually bare-stage production by William Gaskill of a ragged satire on honor, duelling, and roaring-boys— an unlikely candidate for success today; in the event, it showed what a useful institution is a national theatre. Two Changelings, one by Peter Gill and one by Terry Hands, served to reinforce the impression of the play’s psychological modernity. Alsemero’s “there’s scarce a thing but is both loved and loathed” fired this play into a Freudian twentieth century and offered its audiences a steamy world of double living (Hands staged a ceremonious marriage for Beatrice in effigy front-stage while the real Beatrice was enjoying sex with De Flores at the back). For the Shakespearians, it has probably been the year of the R. S. C.’s Alan Howard. His sensitive and intelligent Coriolanus, also directed by Terry Hands, was nevertheless acrobatic in black leather against a black set, high on the gates of Corioli, raised aloft on the spears of his men, or flashing in sword-play on an empty stage, a performance that has not been bettered since Olivier’s Caius Marcius of pre-war years at the Old Vic (which I was just old enough to remember). Howard followed Coriolanus with an engrossingly vivid, selfcritical , self-disgusted Antony in an Antony and Cleopatra...