THEATRE

Harvest Festival
By W. J. IGOE
THE lights on the South 'Bank are -1` going put; the amiable London crowds over the water arc going home. Beneath the green mist, Whistler's river blackens; the odd streak of gold or silver on its rippling velvet reflects the casual lights of the town. Cleopatra's Needle becomes a place of meditation, not carnival.
The theatre continues upon its anarchical way. last week we saw an inane farce. Ten Men and a Girl. justified neither mathematically nor dramatically.
Next week we shall see Mr. Wolfit in a work of Marlowe's not presented since the poet's death, two plays by Mr, Fry, M. Jean-Louis Barrault in one of Clauders, two new comedies and, at the Palladium, Mr. Val Parnel, still encouraging American immigration, offers Sugar Chile Robinson. who, we are ecstatically told, assaults pianos with limbs hitherto reserved for more vulgar purposes. Setting aside Master Robinson, more. a phenomenon than an enter-. tamer, the week's bill conveys a good impression of the eccentricity of English theatre. It is, at least. as rich as the harvest of drama given to the festival. So in the lull between seasons one is permitted to consider the past few months,
THE Festival offerings from the A theatre have been disappointing. Sir Laurence Olivier is the exception. He rose to the occasion. Supreme in rest for life and taste for magnificent pageantry. Olivier was King of the Mardi Gras.
The one playwright who reigned was Shakespeare. From the point of view of contemporary writing. 1951 so far has failed. No harvest was brought by the authors.
Mr. Ustinov's Loves of Four Colonels is commendable but commonplace pastiche, nothing more. Mr. Fry's A Sleep of Prisoners I shall consider later.
We point with pride to Mr.
G ielgud's finely-wrought masterpieces, their lyrical qualities, the actor's marvellous compassion, to the infinite ramifications of Sir Ralph Richardson's poetic ambiguity, the Jamesian actor par excellence: hut it is, I believe. upon the disciplined vitality of Olivier that the future etc o eanssdiso. Passion and order, a religious reverence for human relationships, a sardonic manly humour that honours youth and age. yet. withal, never loses a sagacious irony in focusing human character. a high respect for his art and for the institution of the theatre — these are Olivier's marks.
BOTH qualities are lacking in the writers, who may be divided into two classes and the first of these subdivided. We are plagued in the theatre by melancholics and maniac extroverts.
The first class of melancholia may he seen in Waters of the Moon, where most of the characters are dying because they see no reason to remain alive. They get drunk by accident, fall in love under a misapprehension, and in the intervals just sit around waiting for a hearse to chance along: it is like Chekov rewritten by Marks and Spencer.
M. Jean Anouilh is a fair representative of the depressive school's second type, the puerile Manichean. Here, as in Ardele. the aim is to sublimate the author's personal nausea and besmirch the most sacred of human relationships.
Those of us who objected to the lascivious nonsense have been taken to task in Time and Tide by Mr. Philip Hope Wallace, who assumed that only he understood its message. He did not develop the point. When Mr. Wallace learns to distinguish adolescent lust from human love one hopes he will take up the new sport introduced to British criticism by Mr. Hobson and cat his words.
-at
A PASSIONATE wish for death " and a romantic urge towards chaos are what most playwrights o19ff5e1re.d to the harvest of Britain The exception was Mr. Fry. And his Festival play was written for presentation in a church. Mr. Fry is a religious man who loves life. And the more one learns of British actors, the more one respects them as artists and men; they are, even the roost simple, innately religious. Fry inspires the players. They have been fighting against writers whose conception of life was, and is, bogus, and the fight has been going on since Shaw's assault on God in the English theatre fifty years ago.