Plays
and Players, c. 1973
Chekhov was oddly ashamed of his early play, The
Wood Demon, re-born ten years later as Uncle
Vanya. Ben Jonson, suffering
from sour grapes, was blistering about Pericles
in which Shakespeare probably partnered the mediocrity George Wilkins.
One piece was presumed to be a failure; the other a mere pot-boiler.
Both presumptions—we feel now—are too sweeping.
Lately at Edinburgh Festival the plays, nearly three centuries between
them, were acted by different companies in the Lyceum Theatre.
We could appreciate their merits, though the productions were far apart;
one an exciting rediscovery, the other miscalculated.
In The Wood Demon Chekhov
created first drafts of some of the people of Vanya,
besides other characters that he jettisoned later; we are glad to see them
restored. The play—“the tone throughout is lyrical,” said its
dramatist—is at once more crowded, simpler in spirit and romantically happier
than Vanya; happier even if there is a
suicide at the end of the third act. Long
ago I met one competent amateur revival. The change in this Edinburgh interpretation by the Actors’
Company was startling: the night had a pace and freshness that left most of us
puzzled by Chekhov’s dislike of work so richly positive.
David Giles’s direction never sagged.
This autumn the company is touring the English provinces.
It will be disappointing if London does not meet later such performances
as Ian McKellen’s man of the trees, though we have to miss Astrov’s Vanya speeches over the chart; Robert Eddison’s grandly sure study
in sandpaper as the self-centered Professor; Tenniel Evans, the Vanya-figure;
and Sheila Reid and Margaret Diamond as Sonya and Helen who, however different
they become, are here theatrically potent in their own right
It is probably wise, if hard, to accept The
Wood Demon for itself rather than to relate it to the future.
Anyway, the Actors’ Company has uncovered a prize.
I would have thought the Prospect Theatre Company had a treasure in Pericles,
that pulsating Levantine serial: no need to consider it Jonsonianly, nose in
air. My trouble is to accept Toby
Robertson’s production without summoning half a dozen other revivals.
The best have been the least cluttered, those by Robert Atkins on the
lawn at Regent’s Park just before the war, and by John Harrison on two Sunday
nights at the Rudolf Steiner some years later.
In one the Pericles was Robert Eddison; in the other, Paul Scofield.
For the new revival—which, after Edinburgh, reached the Round House in
London—Derek Jacobi re-created Pericles with unstrained grace and, at the
Recognition, with a fine passion, helped there by Marilyn Taylerson’s Marina. I cannot imagine why Mr. Robertson, observing the triumph of
this passage, its two players alone on a bare stage, did not let the rest of the
piece speak untrammelled. We must
suppose that he did not trust it, an emotion shared—and wrongly—by other
directors besides that comic-historic personage, Old John Coleman.
There was absolutely no call to set the entire action in the brothel, to
use near-modern dress, to wreck various parts in either caricature or
transvestism, and at times to thrust us towards an eccentric musical.
The result was noisy and irritating.
I found my sole pleasure in the sensitive response of Mr. Jacobi and Miss
Taylerson—she doubled daughter and mother—and in Michael David’s hint, as
Simonides during the needlessly fooled Pentapolis scenes, that he might have
achieved something here if allowed to be traditional.
Prospect, we realize, can do far better.
They did so when Twelfth Night, under Mr. Robertson, arrived at the Round House.
True, the costuming again was unexpected—roughly early nineteenth
century Dalmatian-cum-Regency—but it was never troublesome.
Even though Derek Jacobi’s gently unexaggerated Sir Andrew had to look
like the Sergius of Arms and the Man,,
the Ruritanian uniform seemed to go with a character for once as lovable as
foolish: better this than the rusty
death’s-head style once common form. Isla
Blair’s Viola came o’er the ear like the sweet south—obstinately, I stick
to that reading of Orsino’s line—and Harold Innocent’s slow, sonorous
Malvolio, of redoubtable Turkish origin, was always consistent, though why he
should have been incarcerated in a vast wine barrel I have no idea.
Still, never mind: the feeling of the night was Shakespearian, and that is what
matters.