John Greally THEATRE

Husbands and lovers
"QEXUS vincit omnia" is 1..7 the modern trend which a lot of people are following in the belief that it is the whole answer to the world's ills. In English it reads "Make love, not war". As a simple philosophy of life it has filtered down to the coffee-bar set from thinkers like Freud through dreamers like D. H. Lawrence.
Lawrence's The Fight for Barbara. playing at the Mermaid Theatre, is based on his own successful fight to get Frieda von Richtofen to divorce her husband for himself. Like Frieda, Barbara is not sexually attracted to her husband but very much so to her lover. It is sex that conquers.
The play, written in 1912 while Lawrence, aged 27, was also working on Sons and Lovers. was a slap in the eye
for believers in the permanence of marriage. But where Shaw, for instance, can even today be shocking, "The Fight for Barbara" is imbued with a touching naivety.
In it Lawrence shows hardly any mastery of dramatic effect, language. or poetic imagery. Yet the picture that emerges of the relationship between Barbara and her lover Jimmie is sadly amusing, like the progress of two wayward school chums, On the night I was there the audience was practically dead. This was no fault of the company's, for the whole cast were full of vitality. The audience itself was largely at fault. But just as much to blame was the long introduction, compiled by director Robin Midgley.
For the first 45 minutes the principal actors sit on stage reading out bits of biographi
cal background to the play. As an academic exercise this should work very well in a university dramatic society, but at the Mermaid it only produces a bored audience by curtain-up of the play itself. Such a pity, for Midgley's actual production gets every available ounce of entertainment out of Lawrence's unpromising material.
This production follows close on the recent T.V. revival of Lawrence. And as I have suggested, his simple belief that sexual freedom can break down all human barriers is in tune with a growing trend today. As an exercise in exploration it should be worth praising, but the over-all impression you are left with is that Lawrence, like the latterday love peddlers, has done nothing more instructive than blasting himself off into outer space without a capsule.