Page View
Kamarck, Edward (ed.) / Arts in society: the arts of activism
(1969)
Rosenberg, James
Notes and discussion: looking for the third world: theatre report from England, pp. [437]-444
PDF (6.6 MB)
Page 439
in the simple brutalities of dollars and cents, but in the - to an American - far more subtle and invisible, but evidently, to the British, equally powerful concept of "class." The horny-handed American laborers don't go to the so-called "legitimate" ("fine word- legitimate!" as Edmund says) theatre because they simply cannot afford it, period (plus the fact that the theatre has yet to offer them any convincing reason why they should desert their TV set, and their occasional Saturday night movie, in its favor). Over here, they can afford it, but don't go because, somehow, it's just "not done" by the working class; but the sense of class distinction is breaking down rapidly, and even today the typical West End audience presents a far wider social spectrum than the middle-aged, expense-account group of fat cats who constitute about ninety- nine per cent of the typical Broadway audience. As for the companies and the productions themselves, the mainstream of British theatre is dominated by two big permanent companies, the Royal Shakespeare, which is actually two companies, one based in Stratford and specializing in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the other at the Aldwych Theatre in London and specializing mainly in modern work; and the National Theatre, headed by Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Tynan, and based at the Old Vic Theatre on the South Bank. I suppose, in a way, the most prestigious of the two is the National, although both are rather short of "big names" these days. Once you drop down from Olivier, who appears only infrequently either as actor (in DANCE OF DEATH) or director (he is listed as "co-director" of LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST), and his wife, Joan Plowright, star of one of the National's disasters, THE ADVERTISEMENT, you come to such names as Robert Stephens, Robert Lang, John Stride, Geraldine McEwan, Edward Petherbridge - solid and competent performers all, yet none of them calculated to send a thrill of international recognition through American bosoms. The company's No. 1 director is Frank Dunlop, of whom much the same can be said. The Royal Shakespeare is pretty much an echoing gallery of great ghosts of the past -Gielgud, Ashcroft, Scofield, Brook, Hall -who have drifted away to freelance in greener fields, although they 439 can occasionally be coaxed back for single-shot returns, either at the RSC itself or, sometimes, at the rival National; Peter Hall, for example, recently resigned as major domo of the RSC, but his production of Albee's A DELICATE BALANCE is currently on view at the RSC's Aldwych outpost, while one of the sensations of last year's National Theatre season was Peter Brook's version of Seneca's OEDIPUS, starring Gielgud and Irene Worth. Gielgud more and more divides his time between acting and directing; he is now directing and co-starring in Alan Bennett's FORTY YEARS ON, a sort of extended BEYOND THE FRINGE sketch by one of the original four Fringers. Scofield, gloomy and enigmatic, recently closed in John Osborne's HOTEL IN AMSTERDAM, a brilliant sort of cameo performance which was nevertheless quite a step down from LEAR, and he and Brook have now gone off to the chilly coasts of Sweden to make a film version of their now-famous KING LEAR. O'Toole and Finney are both visible in London at the moment on the cinema screens, O'Toole in LION IN WINTER, Finney in CHARLIE BUBBLES, but both, lured by who knows what demons of riches, seem to have virtually abjured the stage. Ralph Richardson is temporarily in town in a posthumous embarrassment by Joe Orton called WHAT THE BUTLER SAW, while Guinness recently closed in his own revival, twenty years after (shades of Dumas!), of THE COCKTAIL PARTY. As for Redgrave, he seems to have resigned in favor of his seemingly innumerable children, who at times threaten (along with John Mills' children) to take over the British theatre completely. Of the two major companies, I have seen more of the work of the RSC, since Stratford is, after all, only about twenty miles from where I am living in Birmingham (although that is rather farther than it may seem by American standards, since one must allow for the 1920-ish quality of British highways, which turns every motor trip into a chase sequence from BONNIE AND CLYDE. When Peter Hall resigned a year or two ago, he was replaced by his then-assistant, Trevor Nunn, a wunderkind who is still on the sunny side of thirty - as Hall was when he took over - and, to my mind, the most interesting of the new crop of British directors. For one thing, Nunn seems to me
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/| Copyright, 1969, by the Regents of the University of Wisconsin.| For information on re-use, see http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/Copyright