THEATRE “In Scarlet And Fur, To Judge Us”

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31500, 14 October 1967, Page 4

THEATRE “In Scarlet And Fur, To Judge Us”

The Judge. A Play by John Mortimer. Methuen.

“What’s this judge for, anyway?” ■“Oh, they send one round sometimes. In scarlet and fur, to judge us.” So speak two of the authorities of the rather antiseptic town in wMeh the play is set, and to which the judge of the title has returned to hold his last assizes. His censorious threats and dark accusations about some corruption which he detects beneath the innocent facades of the town send the authorities scurrying for incontrovertible proofs of their rectitude. They make a scapegoat of “Aunt” Serena, a-lady of eharm and originaltty who runs a kind of impeccable brothel, a haven of freedom and life.

Gradually, however, it becomes dear that the judge is not really interested in the activities of the townspeople. Mentally ill, tormented by the spectres of boyhood and by an inescapable feeling of guilt, he has come back not to judge but to be judged. Like Kafka’s K. he is convinced of his own guilt and of the necessity of his trial; and as with K. it seems relatively certain that the need for punishment is anterior to the committing of the crime. Perhaps we all desire judgment and he whose job it is to judge more than the next fellow. (This paradox we might also apply to critics.) The unfortunate judge of Mortimer’s play has even selected the specific area in which he craves judgment: his treatment of Serena when, as a boy, he had—or had not —his justification for particular guilt remains uncer-tain-agreed to her having an abortion after a liaison about which he had felt abnormally delinquent But Serena, whose attitude to the whole thing is curiously ambiguous, performs that most dastardly

of feminine acts: she forgives him. And the judge, able neither to forgive himself nor to elicit the sentence he desires, suffers his final retribution—the living death of madness.

Psychologically interesting, “The Judge" nevertheless fails to achieve the fullest

resonance as it shuffles the cards of judgment and forgiveness and reaches out towards a statement about man’s need for judgment and the evolution of a society wMch refuses to grant it. The length of the play Is hardly justified by its content And

although the stylised, ritualistic, expressionlstic and alienating techniques, adopted so that the infected mind at the protagonist may live for us in all its contorted

reality, are used with considerable skill, they have the further effect of inviting the reader to search for a kind of significance the play fulfils only In part. Time enough to adopt complex methods when there is something more complex to say. Still, John Mortimer’s play has much to commend it It leaves one with more to think about than many plays,.its atmosphere is at times as heavily charged, ominous and mysterious as that of Pinter or the Arden of “Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance," the characters are reasonably fleshed, the dialogue competent, sometimes brilliant and the technical problems interesting enough to provide a challenge and a stimulus to the inventive producer and actor.