PROMPT
CORNER 09/2007
That Face / The Big Brecht Fest 2 / Rafta, Rafta...
Various
venues
April / May, 2007
When Dominic Cooke heralded his first
Royal Court season with remarks about re-focusing the subjects of its
plays on more middle-class strata, I said nothing here (principally due
to lack of time and space). Obviously, it was ridiculous to fear
that the Court would suddenly transform into an SW1 version of
Chichester (Michael Billington delights in recounting his experience of
seeing the lights go up on a play set and hearing a delighted voice
near him in the audience declare, “Oh, goody, a chaise longue!”).
But fears are irrational, and I have to admit that a little germ of
some kind of that worry did remain. It has been easy for those so
inclined to poke fun at the disjunction between the Court’s perceived
dramatic programme of in-yer-face extremities and
it’s-grim-on-sink-estates privation and its audience drawn from among
the chattering classes, not least in its immediate geographical
environs of prosperous, comfortable Chelsea. But it’s always
possible to over-correct, and that was what was making me uneasy.
However, after seeing the Court’s current offerings, That Face upstairs and My Child in a radically
refashioned main house (reviews next issue), I’m more than
reassured. I would even hazard a guess that Cooke’s remarks might
not so much have been a policy announcement as a rationalisation of
programming decisions which seemed to offer him a convenient conceptual
way to bundle them together for marketing purposes. It will
probably seem odd to link the Royal Court with Alan Ayckbourn in this
way, but I was reminded of Ayckbourn’s response to the glib accusation
that he writes about and for the middle class: that his middle class is
the contemporary, broad middle class in which we almost all identify
ourselves.
Assured
Admittedly, it’s rather harder to sustain that argument in the case of That Face: while private education
is increasingly common in Britain, and atomised families are all but
the statistical norm, it’s scarcely an ordinary experience to offer
Mummy the choice of checking herself into a private mental institution
before Daddy flies in from his second family in Hong Kong to have her
sectioned. But writer Polly Stenham is concerned with the
children (and not in a “Won’t somebody please think of the children?!”
way), with showing that the stresses and deprivations which screw us up
need not be material.
Taking that view to its extreme would be endorsing the kind of position
taken several years ago by former Eurythmic David A. Stewart, who tried
to claim he suffered from something called Paradise Syndrome, suffering
depression precisely because he had everything he wanted both
materially and creatively. Stenham, of course, gets nowhere near
such a position. It really is a remarkably assured piece of
writing fro someone who was still in their teens when it was
composed. What we must do now, of course, is restrain ourselves
from pushing her too far, too fast: she has an evident and considerable
gift which it’s our duty not to burn out.
Chastened
The second half of the Young Vic’s Big
Brecht Fest was more than welcome, too; Dominic Cavendish is
right to wish that the double bills spanning the Maria and Clare
studios had been twinned with a main-house production. Sandy
McDade in Señora Carrar’s
Rifles is not simply an excellent Brechtian heroine but one
that manages to evoke at once Brecht’s own flinty Germanism, the Celtic
forebears of the play (in particular Synge’s Riders To The Sea) and even the
Spanish setting: McDade has twice played Angustias in The House Of Bernarda Alba,
including once at the Young Vic, but in a few years’ time she will make
an excellent if unorthodox Bernarda. We do not see enough of
McDade south of the border, and do not recognise her talents enough
when we do.
And yet something about this particular pairing brought out
reservations in me – not quite to the extent voiced by Sharon Garfinkel
in her Tribune review, but
nevertheless… It’s comically obvious to note explicitly that
Brecht was a writer of immense political commitment, and indubitably it
enriches our understanding to see such naked agitprop pieces
revived. But does my discomfort increase because ours is an age
beyond such simple protests, or rather because we continue to feel
chastened by these kind of direct exhortations even at a lifetime's
remove?
Both pieces are punctuated by basso rumbles
and tremors which both sound warlike and remind us of the double-bill's
subtitle, The Earthquakes To Come.
And yet the unambiguous mentality of "If you are not with us, you are
against us" so exalted here – explicitly stated by a character in the
Spanish play, and so stridently the theme of the parable against
Swedish neutrality in the face of the Nazis, How Much is Your Iron? – is
precisely the attitude I had seen on the very previous night being
dissected with regard to Bush and Blair's Iraq policy in Called To Account. Commitment
is laudable when we agree with it, otherwise it is deplorable
fanaticism; and hindsight is one of our most precious gifts.
Afternoon
movie
Finally, another of my periodic “I’m astounded that…” comments: are
Paul Taylor and Rachel Halliburton really the only reviewers (apart
from me) to remember what I have always understood to be a classic of
1960s British cinema, The Family Way?
Everyone dutifully notes the source of Rafta, Rafta… in Bill Naughton’s
comedy All In Good Time, but
scarcely anyone points out that that play began its life (under yet
another title) on the small screen and is best known as the
aforementioned film, with father and daughter John and Hayley Mills
playing father and daughter Ezra and Jenny Fitton. Well, for
anyone who has managed to miss it in an afternoon movie slot on
television, the DVD is under £10 on Amazon. None of which
is to detract from Ayub Khan-Din’s wonderful British-Asian update of
it; Nicholas de Jongh of course entirely misses the point by assuming
that the play must share dominant metropolitan attitudes towards
homosexuality, and more to the point by not cracking a single smile.
Written for Theatre Record.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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