Illustrated
London News
1970
Among the many phrases by Christopher Fry, one in particular, from The
Dark Is Light Enough, has stayed across the years, recurring so often that
it has become a kind of personal King Christopher’s Head:
Music would unground us best,
as a tide in the dark comes to boats at
anchor
And they
begin to dance.
That is not the preferred voice of the contemporary stage, grumbling away
to itself. But it is a voice I am
sure, that is needed; more than any dramatist since the war, Fry has got our
language to dance. For me, his new piece, A Yard of Sun,
at Nottingham Playhouse, is one of those delights too seldom met.
This is the “summer comedy” that now completes the seasonal quartet.
Fry establishes it, with it’s many levels of meaning, in a courtyard in Siena
during 1946, on the eve of the city’s famous celebration, the Palio.
Here, after the darkness of the war, is a family in reunion:
for all its diverse temperaments, recognizably a family.
It is an hour of renewal, but in what way?
Fry puts question upon question in a play intricately textured.
All the seasons mingle in it. The
dramatist avoids any glib cliché; he faces and examines every problem, and his
dialogue.. At the. National next month; meanwhile, let me compliment its
director, Stuart Burge; its designer, Robin Archer, who places us so
miraculously in the courtyard of the palazzo whose Italian name means
“goal,” and such players as Frank Middlemass, Eithne Dunne, and Cherith
Mellor.
Elsewhere, during a crowded period, the major companies have been either
presenting new work or burnishing a former production.
The Idiot (National) is new,
Simon Gray’s version of the Dostoievsky novel that seeks to depict the
positively good man at large among the “thorns and dangers of this world.”
I find performance better than play.
The adapter’s path through the vast novel can deviate, not always
helpfully, from the usual course; and I do not much like the employment of
Ferdyshenko as an obtrusive and rancid narrator.
One can be grateful for most of the acting.
Derek Jacobi has both the sweetness, never cloying, and the strangeness
of Myshkin; he holds the stage as firmly as Smoktunovsky or Istvan Iglodi, two
notable players I have seen in recent years.
Diane Cilento is a naturally governing Nastasya.
The major scenes at the Old Vic, as Anthony Quayle has directed them, the
frenzy of the auction, and the final resolution under the eyes of those
projected ikons on Svoboda’s setting take the mind as they should; but I have
known versions more progressively exciting.
I think the fault is Mr. Gray’s.