Where the dead sing on

Press, 18 February 1986, Page 13

Where the dead sing on

London is the city of the singing dead. If you like your necrophilia set to music, the West End of the moment is the place for you. You can see Elvis Presley, John Lennon and, most recently, Judy Garland raised from the grave and singing their hearts out to packed theatres. If this trend continues, Shaftesbury Avenue will be a linear seance. This is an indication at least that musicals are the things. The large theatres still bulge with the long-running “Cats”, “Starlight Express”, and “42nd Street,” and the habit of reviving pre-war shows that began with “Mr Cinders” continues with the immensely successful "Me and My Girl” — the old 1930 s musical comedy that contains “Lambeth Walk.”

Even the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company is getting in on the act. It has mounted a version of Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables,” a soft-rock opera. It runs for 3114 hours without a joke. Although the music is very derivative — several songs sound like Stevie Wonder’s “I just called to say I love you” with a couple of notes changed — the tunes are pleasant. It is hard to explain the success of such a piece. Tickets are hard to come by, even for the cavernous Palace Theatre. Perhaps it is the staging, which is superbly spectacular. The expansive and empty stage, surfaced to look like French cobbles and surrouded by vague forms that could be towering slum tenements, is suddenly filled with two enormous towers of junk — old bedsteads, mattresses, broken furniture — which slowly track towards each other. From the sky an iron bridge descends to connect the two towers. Before our eyes the crawling slums of Paris are created.

In the second half, the same two junk towers move towards each other, bend in the middle, interlock, and a barricade, 4.5 metres high, is formed on which the 1830 revolution is fought with muskets firing, tricolours waving, and the noble dead falling poetically to death much in the of Delacroix’s famous if one domin-

ant feature of the London stage it is the stage design. The set designers have become the stars. Frequently I saw indifferent performances in front of amazing and beautiful stage sets and was reminded of Noel Coward’s remark about leaving a musical whistling the scenery. “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” a revival of the old Edwardian war-horse, has astonishing effects. The guillotine looms out of the mists to decapitate aristocrats, then disappears to be replaced instantly by an elegant English garden. However, the actors are often standing in front of the most interesting part of the performance.

The same was true of Glenda Jackson in “Phaedra” of Racine. One remembers not the destructive anguish of a sexually aroused wcfepan in Racine’s masterpiece, but the moment

when the entire set seems to be blasted forward by the anger of the god. The rear wall falls forward, smashing the stone screen, against which most of the play has been performed, to reveal among the rubble and smoke four dead white horses, their blood pouring forward to spatter the guilty Theseus, who sits at the forward edge of the stage. But such effects cannot save the day if the acting is indifferent What was brought home to me by “Phaedra”, and even by much of the acting on the edges of the great companies like the National and the Royal Shakespeare, was the decline of good support One of the glories of the English theatre used to be the quality of supporting actors, players who, though they would never have thPr. names above the title, coulcF' turn in star

performances in small parts. The only reason for this decline I can suggest is the demise of the old repertory theatres in which most actors got their early experience. There, week in and week out, they played all sorts of parts, in all sorts of conditions to the most difficult of audiences; ,and, in so doing, brought on to the stage invisible skills of control and economy. This field of training has largely disappeared and young actors often find their way to fame by a comely appearance and a few lines of television. Their innate abilities are undoubtedly as great, but they have not had the opportunity to hone them in the way a former generation did. And it shows. Amid all this music and scenery, it is hard to find good, new, serious plays or even to find good, new, serious comedies either in the West End or on the fringe. The small fringe theatres which depended on subsidy from the London County Council are facing death with Margaret Thatcher’s abolition of this great and artistically liberal body. Even the Almeida, perhaps the most exciting “alternative” theatre to emerge in recent years, is threatened. (The night I was there they were opening a play by a specially imported Palestinian company. All bags were searched and bomb warnings were stuck up everywhere). On the evening before I left London, the R.S.C. presented Christopher Hampton’s stage version of Laclos’ great eighteenth century novel, “Les Liasons Dangereuses” (the title is not translated). It is one; of the best plays and performances I have seen in the last 10 years. Although the world of aristocratic corruption just before the French Revolution may seem remote, the insight into human evil was so direct and the wit so shockingly fresh and funny that I and the rest of the first-night audience were suspended in time. This is transcendent theatre, eternal and immediate. At a stroke, just as it had been by the R.S.C’s "Nicholas Nickleby” some years ago, my faith in the English genius for theatre had been revived.

ELRIC HOOPER, director of the Court Theatre, reports on the state of theatre in London in the first of three articles about the theatre overseas.