Theater: Hit & Miss in Minnesota

The second season of the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis opened with a palpable hit, Henry V, and a palpable miss, Saint Joan. There are shortcomings in both. After a year of playing Minneapolis, the company has adopted a broader style, giving the Midwest audience the kind of easy laughs it seems to demand. The play choices are scarcely venturesome. On the record of the Guthrie Theater so far, the oft-expressed hope that decentralized regional theater might revitalize the enfeebled condition of the drama in the U.S. must be deferred.

Henry V. Something resembling a thunderbolt is heard offstage. Out of nowhere, what seem like a hundred men are shouting, sweating, straining as they haul a cannon to stage center. It belches smoke. It is hidden in smoke. The whole theater is going up in smoke. A man has mounted the cannon, but it is difficult to see him, let alone hear him. He is King Henry V (George Grizzard), and what he is saying is, “God for Harry, England and St. George.” What the scene is saying is—the prop’s the thing.

Yet this cannon is virtually the only conversation piece that Director Tyrone Guthrie has permitted himself. His Henry V is the least tricked-up Shakespearean production that Guthrie has ever been associated with in the U.S. Except for cutting some lines for pace, he trusts the author and the playgoer, for a change, and the play flashes like an unsheathed sword, keen, virile, inescapably compelling. It is a patriot’s poem of valor, a memorial ode written in the bright and acrid air of combat for all men who ever fought, bled and died for their country’s honor.

For those who may legitimately have felt that Olivier’s magnificent film would dwarf future stage productions of Henry V, Guthrie’s production is a revelation. The scope and sweep of action that he crams into “the wooden O” are astonishing. The arena stage helps, since action initiated offstage picks up tremendous momentum by the time it hits the stage: Guthrie sends soldiers winging down the aisles like javelins.

He is a master of crowd scenes, never moving bunches of people about aimlessly or frantically. Like the great film directors, D. W. Griffith and Eisenstein, he achieves compositions of masses in motion that have esthetic force and balance. When the soldiers circle their king, they are humble spokes of fealty wheeling around the hub of majesty. Men wounded and dying are draped onstage with the comely anguish of Pietàs of the battlefield.

If Guthrie competes handsomely with the Olivier film, his leading actor does not. The pattern of George Grizzard’s gifts and limitations comes clearer with each performance he gives. When there is a broad streak of nastiness in a character, Grizzard plays the role splendidly, but something sly, evasive and insecure in his countenance and bearing saps all conviction from his attempts to play parts like Hamlet and Henry V. His “Once more unto the breach, dear friends” and St. Crispin’s Day (“we happy few”) speeches are not plunges of passion but sputterings of saliva.

Henry V alternates between high spirits and desolation of spirit, and Grizzard is best when the morale of the play and the troops is lowest. When one of Henry’s brothers, Gloucester, speaks fearfully of the French, the king quietly says, “We are in God’s hands, brother, not in theirs.” Again, Grizzard is touchingly good as he comforts his tattered band on the eve of Agincourt with “a little touch of Harry in the night.” On balance, however, he does not drive the play forward. He is hauled through it, rather like the cannon.

Saint Joan. Bernard Shaw has aged greatly since his death. His plays are beginning to settle like old houses. More and more cracks show in the dramatic structure. The carpeting of ideas is faded, overfamiliar and, in spots, threadbare. Even the wit is surprisingly creaky: “Oh! You are an Englishman, are you?” “Certainly not, my lord: I am a gentleman.” The ghost of Shaw haunts all the rooms, but his voice sounds more garrulous than eloquent, and he speaks with pedantry rather than passion.

The play is more than ever a star vehicle, since only star fire will kindle the dramatic deadwood. As Joan, Ellen Geer puts her teeth into the part and not much else. There have been earthy peasant Joans (Siobhan McKenna) and eternal-child Joans (Julie Harris). At a guess, Director Douglas Campbell or Actress Geer conceived of the saint as tomboy. This tomboy Joan wants to conquer the English at Orleans for the sheer roughhousing fun of it. Thus, when she is captured, imprisoned and questioned by her inquisitors, it is merely as if her playmates were being taken away from her, and there is no anguishing foretaste of martyrdom.

The rest of the cast cannot fill the vacuum left by this Joan, but George Grizzard achieves a telling comic portrait of the Dauphin. He is petulant, epicene; he oozes suppressed venom. Wandering erratically about the stage like an uncooped hen, he scratches up laugh after laugh.

Time has worked a peculiar irony on playwrights like Shaw and Ibsen. Their liberal, independent-minded heroes and heroines are beginning to sound like stubborn, self-willed children who refuse to grow up to reality. At the same time, ironically, their reactionary clerics and villainous statesmen are beginning to sound like paragons of good sense. The doctrine Shaw preaches in Saint Joan is every woman her own woman, every man his own king and commoner, his own lawgiver and lawbreaker, his own god and creature. The very adoption of these ideas has exposed their limitations as panaceas for a better and happier world.

Shaw persisted in thinking that total freedom fosters total reason and total reason begets complete virtue. He used his pen like a sword, and plays that live by the polemical sword die that way.