Plays
and Players
1967
During the first speeches of Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy,
at Chichester Festival Theatre, the stage is in absolute darkness without a
glimmer or needle-point of light. To
our surprise the people on the stage—and we hear the voices of Derek Jacobi
and Louise Purnell—appear to be discussing something that they can see, and we
cannot (“What do you think of the room?”).
For two or three minutes they go on while we wonder what can have
happened: it is a situation fit for
Sam Weller, who observed that if his eyes were “a pair o’ patent double
million magnifyin’ gas microscopes of hextra power,” he might be able to see
through a flight of stairs and a deal door.
Then, of a sudden, Jacobi cries indignantly that a fuse has gone, and at
once the stage is fiercely and triumphantly lit.
Before us is what the programme describes as an apartment in South
Kensington; its owners are groping about it as if they are in some mad new game
of blind man’s bluff. The light
is dark enough.
So the play (second in a double bill) proceeds through 70 minutes.
The stronger the lighting, the denser the imagined stage darkness.
If anyone strikes a match, the light promptly dims a little; two matches,
and it dims further. Somebody uses
an electric torch, and the light decreases.
When the fuse is mended, and the room can be illuminated fully, we know
that the stage will go bitumen-black, vanish in cuttlefish-ink darkness.
Having established this, Shaffer briskly develops the farcical plot.
An avant-garde artist,
expecting a visit from a European millionaire, has had to “dress” his flat;
illicitly he has borrowed from an absent and wealthy neighbor some
furniture—chairs, a sofa, a flower vase—and a valuable Buddha. This is the
night, too, when his babbling fiancée’s father, a gun-flint colonel, is
coming to examine him. I need say
only that the colonel arrives; that the neighbor, an epicene aesthete, gets back
too soon from his week-end; that another neighbor wanders in; that the
artist’s mistress increases the confusion; that a foreign workman from the
Electricity Board is mistaken for the millionaire; and that the great man
himself enters (and falls through a trapdoor) during a last helter-skelter when
the lights are restored and the stage grows impenetrably dark.
Shaffer’s effects are inventively visual.
His people falter, grope, totter, move crabwise, miss each other by
inches, cannon off the furniture, or climb upstairs like mountaineers on a
beetling rock-face. As the plot
twists, the evolutions are more complex. The
borrowed furniture has to be restored to the next-door flat without the
owner’s knowledge, so we have the spectacle of Derek Jacobi, chair-laden,
charting a hazardous passage across the stage, while all round him the talk runs
at cross purposes. It is even more
alarming when the young man’s mistress, turning up in the darkness—which for
us is as bright as the Arabian noon—finds herself the subject of a candid
conversation: every shade of horror
flits across Maggie Smith’s face as she gropes, bewildered, to a seat.
Much of this, as acted by the National Theatre Company, is richly mad.
I don’t know how John Dexter coped with the production: but on the night I began to think of the pamphlet of 24
detailed pages that Granville-Barker prepared (fruitlessly) for the Forum scene
in Julius Caesar. The cast times it all precisely, moving in the best farcical
circles; and no lighting designer has deserved his credit more than Richard
Pilbrow does. Yet, at the risk of
ingratitude, I think the play is uneasily protracted.
If this were in a revue, we might consider ten minutes ample.
At Chichester we know (and accept) that there must be a much longer
spell; but, half-way through, the dramatist seems to be searching for material
and we flag a little. He recovers; even so, the night could be funnier at
two-thirds its length.
This said, I have to agree that Shaffer’s repetitions had the
Chichester audience in a full gale of laughter.
The players are entirely responsive:
Derek Jacobi, in bristling determination; Louise Purnell, whose voice is
midway between screech and wailing yawn; Albert Finney, with a peevish purr;
Maggie Smith, swerving into assumed cockney; and Graham Crowden, who is
obviously speaking through a mixture of gravel and broken glass.
Maybe there is more in the piece than it’s farcical movement.
Truth is revealed in the dark; anybody anxious to probe might have a good
time with Black Comedy.
Not, I think, that anyone will probe.