Theater Abroad: The Lights of London

To the sophisticated American theatergoer, a London theater season is al most as important as the French summer season is to the sophisticated American wine drinker. The stuff will come over here sooner or later, and when it does, it will probably be better than anything produced domestically.

London just now is experiencing the beginning of what seems to be a vintage year. Most notably, John Osborne has opened a play called Inadmissible Evidence which is at least as good as Look Back in Anger. Where once he brayed over the cardboard shoulders of Jimmy Porter at a generalized, unconscionable society, he now concentrates his focus on an individual, mercilessly sketching his moral deterioration.

The hero-victim is a middle-aged solicitor, and it is the hour of his ultimate estrangement. His clients shrug him off. His mistress, wearying of him, cancels plans for the weekend with him. His clerk, who has really been running the law practice, gives notice. His secretary, with whom he used to catch a few winks on the office couch, tells him she is pregnant and leaving to marry her new lover. His daughter listens passively to his wandering verbiage, then walks wordlessly away from him. His wife attacks him savagely on the phone, and he opts not to go home again. He learns that the bar association has initiated measures to have him disbarred. He seizes a moment of sweaty oblivion with the switchboard operator, but that is the only kind of success left to him.

Nicol Williamson carries out magnificently a part that is punishingly long and concentrated. Osborne skillfully manages to arrest his hero just on the brink of the absurd—even if his man does persist in viewing others just a bit less flatteringly than they view him. “The whole bloody island is blocked,” says the solicitor, “with those flatulent, purblind mating weasels.”

God the Father. Lionel Bart, composer of Oliver, is also at his best in a new musical called Maggie May. Maggie is a Liverpool strumpet, played with unbuttoned excellence by Rachel Roberts. She dreams of the day when her First will come home. He is a sailor, and when he does return, he becomes a dockside agitator and strike leader, as his father once was—a hazardous occupation that results in his violent death. Kenneth Haigh, who was the original Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, is just right as the hero. Bart’s music is beautifully done—”edging towards ballad-opera,” as the Times put it—and full of the rhythms and sounds he picks up by wandering the streets with a tape recorder. The book by Alun Owen, who wrote the script of A Hard Day’s Night for Liverpool’s own Beatles, is a masterwork in Merseyside accents that could stand as a straight play.

A new play by Graham Greene is a curiosity and a half. Called Carving a Statue, it stars Ralph Richardson, who is a single-minded whittler. To the exclusion of all else, he works in his studio on a massive statue of God. Well, not quite all else. He takes time out to seduce his son’s girl friend. Then the family doctor has a go at the boy’s next girl, who happens to be a deaf-mute. She runs off and is killed. Despite head-scratching reviews, the play is running strong. It will in all likelihood make its way to the U.S., where audiences can decide for themselves if God is really the father.

Epic Title. London’s Aldwych theater, which is operated by Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company of Stratford, is making a name for itself as an outlet for new and experimental plays in repertory. Later this month, they have an item called Victor, or The Children Take Over, by French Playwright Roger Vitrac. The plot calls for a woman to make flatus with noisy regularity, which is accomplished with a backstage tuba.

But London’s biggest sensation is a play about the Marquis de Sade, written by a little-known German playwright named Peter Weiss. De Sade is a prisoner in a lunatic asylum during the French Revolution. He holds up the cynical end of long philosophical discussions with the revolutionary Marat, who sits in a tub. Under De Sade’s influence, the other inmates—male lechers, burnt-out whores, renegade priests, and varied slobbering maniacs—weave through a kind of play within the play, which ends with the death of Marat. He is stabbed in his tub by the patriot Charlotte Corday, who has spent the rest of the evening trying to dodge the gross advances of an indefatigable satyr who has his hand under a nun’s skirt as the play ends.

The full title of this work is The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Although it has been variously interpreted as a study in meaninglessness and a parable of Hitlerism, few people pretend to understand it. It is nonetheless a theatergoing must. If you live in London and have not seen it, the thing to say is, “No, but I have read the title.”