“Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.” True, but Voltaire might have added that the worse is the friend of the bad. Compared with most of what was going on around it, Wise Child—a bizarre first play by Simon Gray—seemed almost tolerable. “At least,” I heard someone say in the intermission, “it’s fairly pretentious.” The theme is sexual ambiguity, exemplified by a trio of social outcasts: a robber on the run, disguised as a middle-aged matron and holed up in a provincial hotel; his accomplice, a willowy lad with an Oedipal fixation, who is posing as his son; and the Scottish hotelier, a deeply religious homosexual named Simon (“after Simon called Peter, the fisher of men”), who sets his cap at the pseudo son. This triangle is extended by an ingenuous West Indian chambermaid to whom the robber, an impenitent hetero, takes a passing shine. After two hours of sour and only occasionally penetrating banter, matters rise to a climax of gratuitous violence—that obligatory hallmark of black comedy. The passionate Scot is clubbed to death by the junior Oedipus. But the play has not earned its right to that kind of seriousness. What we have here is a farce that has tried to get above itself and failed for want of emotional propulsion. The best acting, in the sense of psychological identification, came from Gordon Jackson as the prim, devoutly effusive Scottish queer. The best performance, in the sense of technical virtuosity, was that of Alec Guinness, who played the enforced transvestite. He skated rings round the part, his voice changing—often within a sentence, sometimes within a phrase—from a tight-lipped Kensington twitter to a beery Cockney growl. No sooner did you catch yourself peering inquisitively at his stocking tops than he recalled you to sanity with a baritone jeer. This was a marvellous display of external skills, and it fully confirmed what a shrewd critic of acting once told me: “Alec has no center. He works best on the outer edges of his personality. At the periphery of himself, he is a master.”
Wise Child was no isolated oddity but part of a pattern to which many of the younger British playwrights are at present conforming. Their characteristic mode is comic menace couched in enigmatic non sequiturs and finally erupting in arbitrary brutality; their watchword is moral noncommitment; and their martyred saint is Joe Orton—the author of Entertaining Mr. Sloane and Loot—whose short life (he was thirty-four) ended dreadfully last year, when he was battered to death by his roommate. Orton wrote shapely, deadpan comedies about the grimier aspects of human behavior, on which he cast a cool but not censorious eye. His style was often jejune, and he died before it could properly mature, but at its best it had a laconic, unshockable grace that contrasted superbly with the squalor of his subject matter. In diluted form, the Orton manner survives in his imitators. No harm in that, but they have also inherited his complete lack of interest in social and political change. The work they produce is entirely unprotesting. Calm acceptance of the evitable as well as the inevitable—such is the attitude they reflect and, by implication, recommend. (And the setting need not be modern. Witness the flamboyant fatalism of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead—a worm’s-eye view of Hamlet with the doomed worms humbly acquiescing in their own extinction.) The mutinous energies that were released in 1956 by the première of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger seem now to be temporarily exhausted. According to Hilary Spurling, the drama critic of the Spectator, we ought to have expected that “the primitives of the fifties would be followed by a wave of more sophisticated playwrights.” Miss Spurling then refers to the famous British revue Beyond the Fringe, in which Alan Bennett preached a comic sermon on the text “Behold, Esau my brother is an hairy man, and I am a smooth man.” Using this as her springboard, she claims that the hairy age of British theatre is over, and that “just as John Osborne provided a battle cry for an earlier generation, so Mr. Bennett’s is the text of our own.” I won’t pretend to share Miss Spurling’s delight in this development. With smoothness has come detachment—a civilized virtue, to be sure, but one that tends to drive out passion.
In the work of Harold Pinter, however, though he is the prophet of the smooth school, an apparent detachment conceals strong and complex feelings. They freeze when they are exposed to the Arctic climate of mutual mistrust in which his characters (and, by implication, most people) habitually communicate with one another, but passion is always there, just under the quick-frozen surface, and this pressure of emotion is what distinguishes his world from that of his followers. Getting him to write a play is like begging a glacier to hurry, and nothing new from his pen arrived on the London stage in 1967. He was, however, responsible for the gelid direction of The Man in the Glass Booth, the drame à thèse by the actor-novelist-playwright Robert Shaw that has now moved to Broadway. This fashionably applauded piece, in transposing the Eichmann trial into fictional terms, sets out to shock us into a fresh awareness of the meaning of guilt, but it plays like a pompous detective thriller. The author’s aim is to show us a new Christ figure, willing to take upon himself all the sins of the world, Jewish and Gentile alike. The thesis is fascinating, but the characters are vinyl cutouts. Donald Pleasence, who plays the principal role, resembles a parody of the late Lenny Bruce impersonating Louis B. Mayer—or so, at least, it seemed in London. Playgoers in New York, always notorious for their anglophilia, may have other views of Mr. Pleasence’s performance.
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The best new British play to hit the commercial sector of the London theatre in 1967 was Peter Nichols’ A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, known on Broadway as Joe Egg tout court. It began its career, significantly, with a state-subsidized repertory company in Glasgow. From there it was transferred to the West End, with the original cast substantially intact. The London opening was one of those occasions that mark a seismographic shift in public taste: something theretofore taboo entered the realm of theatrical acceptance. How can a young provincial schoolteacher and his wife cope with reality when their child turns out to be a spastic? Only (according to Mr. Nichols, himself the father of a handicapped daughter) by treating the agony as a grotesque cosmic joke—by laughing at what would otherwise be unbearable. Cruelty cauterizes, and if you are the parents of a “human vegetable” it’s saner to invent vaudeville routines about your predicament than to spend your time in floods of self-pity. The first half of the play is faultless, a model of desperate hilarity, and the London production had movingly funny performances by Joe Melia and Zena Walker as Dad and Mum. Part II doesn’t walk the tightrope with quite the same aplomb. Mr. Nichols trumps up a melodramatic dénouement in which the husband leaves his wife after trying to freeze their daughter to death by exposing her to the nocturnal blasts of an English winter. This makes a strong ending, but the crux of the situation is that it cannot end. It is tragic precisely because it is permanent. In seeking to solve an insoluble problem, Mr. Nichols fails, but he fails at a very high level. When he slips, it is off a mountain, not a molehill. It takes great talent to steer a work of art to a position in which such mistakes are possible. I don’t think it’s irrelevant to harp on the fact that the play had its first showing at the hands of a state-aided company. How many commercial producers would have risked their money on a comedy about a spastic? Moreover, the play is an essentially theatrical experience, in that many of its best effects occur when one of the actors steps out of a scene and directly addresses the audience. This is a trick that never really works in movies or in television drama, where we know that the actors are addressing a single, impassive, robot spectator—the camera.
BRENDAN GILL
JUNE 28, 1969 (OH! CALCUTTA!)
WITH ALL MY heart, I recommend staying away from the slick and repulsive come-on called Oh! Calcutta!, the very title of which—a pun in English on a ribald French slang phrase—hints at the abject schoolboy level of wit to which this “entertainment with music” laboriously aspires. The drama critic and impresario Kenneth Tynan is billed as having “devised” the show, and I am at a loss to understand how he has managed to plunge so unnimbly far below the standards that he has always set for others. I am also at a loss to know
why Jacques Levy should wish it to be known that the “entire production was conceived and directed by Jacques Levy.” In Mr. Levy’s shoes, I would have given it out that the director’s name was Millard Fillmore, or maybe Gyp the Blood. The authors of the tasteless and talentless skits that make up the bulk of the show are mercifully denied individual credit for their handiwork; writhing together like snakes in a pail under the heading “Contributors” are Samuel Beckett, Jules Feiffer, Dan Greenburg, John Lennon, Jacques Levy, Leonard Melfi, Sam Shepard, Kenneth Tynan, Sherman Yellen, and the team of David Newman and Robert Benton. Even the least of this uneven assortment of names is diminished by its association with Oh! Calcutta! As for the attractive young actors and actresses who people the stage of the inappropriately renamed Eden Theatre, what can they have been thinking of when they consented to appear in roles that in most cases require little more of them than that they shuck off their clothes, talk dirty, and manipulate themselves and each other sexually in a dreary succession of conventional burlesque blackouts? I suppose the question answers itself: actors prefer working to thinking, and for them any stage is better than none.
Of the many gifts of the many people associated with Oh! Calcutta!, the one that has served the show best is Mr. Tynan’s Barnum-like capacity for lining up suckers by dint of skillful advance publicity. In a number of pronunciamentos handed down to the press before the opening, he indicated that his intention was to give the public what it richly deserves and rarely gets—a demonstration in a theatre of the joyful nature of sex. To this end, it was archly promised that all of the members of the cast would be, from time to time, totally naked (and how beautiful their bodies are, in the pride and disciplined suppleness of their youth!), but obviously there is more to sex than nudity, and it is perversely Victorian of Mr. Tynan to have put so much emphasis upon it. But the chief indictment to be made of Oh! Calcutta! is that, a couple of dance numbers aside, there is not a single joyful thing about it; it is a radically anti-erotic enterprise, whose gloomy and preposterous message is that women are objects, either dangerous or funny, and, in any case, deserving to be abased and defiled. An audience that sits and listens to such a message is also abased and defiled.
WHITNEY BALLIETT
JULY 22, 1967
FRIDAY. TONIGHT, WHICH was promisingly cool and clear, was touted as a history of jazz and the “Schlitz Salute to Jazz in 1967” (the beer people plunked down a manly twenty-five-thousand-dollar subsidy for the evening), but it turned out to be an astonishing parade of pianists made up of Willie the Lion Smith, Earl Hines, Count Basie, Thelonious Monk, and John Lewis. (The concert also turned out to be in the classic horn-of-plenty Newport Jazz Festival tradition; there were no fewer than ten groups, and the concert lasted over five hours. The departing crowd, bent and shuffling, resembled a mass of Stepin Fechits and Groucho Marxes.) Hines was the guidon. After a good solo rendition of “You Can Depend on Me,” he was joined by Ruby Braff for a couple of surprisingly successful duets. The two men, both fearless, self-preoccupied ornamentalists, had never played together before, but they got off a graceful “These Foolish Things” and a fast, intent “Rosetta.” Hines’ solos were full of his arrhythmic whirlpools and upper-register, single-note jubilations, and Braff managed to move in apposite parallels. Willie the Lion, got up in his summer uniform (straw skimmer, white jacket, and cigar), played a vigorous if brief “Carolina Shout” and then teamed up for three numbers with Don Ewell, a hardy disciple of Jelly Roll Morton and Fats Waller. Smith, who gives the deceptive impression when he plays that he is stretched out on a chaise longue casually dictating his memoirs, is almost always unpredictable, and tonight was no exception. He produced booming, irregular chord patterns and rifle-shot single notes, while Ewell, a correct but swinging pianist, was an admirable foil. Basie backed Buddy Tate and Buck Clayton in two sensuous numbers (Tate and Clayton are not only the two best-looking men in the world but the most luxurious-sounding) and then headed up his own cartel, but he was, lamentably, visible only in short solos and behind soloists. (When will someone march Basie into a recording studio with a first-rate rhythm section and let him loose—an event that hasn’t taken place for over twenty years?) An impossible all-star reunion of former bebop kings—Dizzy Gillespie, James Moody, Milt Jackson, Thelonious Monk, Percy Heath, and Max Roach—was indeed impossible, save for Monk. Gillespie seemed inhibited, Moody was uncertain, Jackson was mechanical, and Roach, as is his custom, was on Cloud 9. But Monk, stewing enjoyably in his own inexhaustible juices, was imperturbable, particularly in “How High the Moon,” in which he took an excellent solo and supplied Gillespie with a stream of sudden, jarring chords that suggested a sheriff shooting up the ground around a sluggish outlaw. John Lewis brought up the rear with the Modern Jazz Quartet, demonstrating again that there are few pianists—tonight’s diamonds included—who put as much grace and thought and intensity into each chorus. In his quiet, deliberate way, he took the blue ribbon.
The evening had other pleasures. The Newport Jazz Festival All Stars (Ruby Braff, Pee Wee Russell, Bud Freeman, George Wein, Jack Lesberg, and Don Lamond) offered, among other numbers, a slow “Sugar,” in which Russell, more sotto-voce than usual, fashioned—or perhaps was fashioned by—a four-bar phrase made up of incredibly juggled notes, and a slow “Summertime,” in which Budd Johnson, sitting in on soprano saxophone, wailed and pirouetted à la Sidney Bechet. The concert was closed by the Albert Ayler Quintet, a “new-thing” group that includes Ayler (a saxophonist), his brother (a trumpeter), and the drummer Milford Graves. Most of their efforts were expended on an occasionally funny parody of what sounded like a Salvation Army hymn and of fragments of “There’s No Place Like Home” and “Eeny-Meeny-Miney-Mo.” After a small sampling, the audience began packing up and leaving, causing my companion to observe that “Ayler is really breaking it up.”
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Saturday. The weather is getting restless. It is still cool, but fog has been doing the mazurka up and down Narragansett Bay all afternoon, and tonight it circled once about the town and fell asleep. So did much of tonight’s concert. The John Handy Quintet (vibraphone, guitar, bass, drums, and the leader’s alto saxophone) punched and plodded through two endless numbers, one a musical attempt at “what it took to get James Meredith into the University of Mississippi” and the other a Spanish-tinged new-thing number called “Señor Nancy.” Nina Simone, a Juilliard-trained pianist and singer who relishes a mean country blues, got hung up in a couple of interminable laments about loose men and fast women, and Dizzy Gillespie, appearing with his quintet, did four by-rote numbers. But the oddest disappointment was the new and revolutionary Gary Burton Quartet, which has Larry Coryell on guitar, Steve Swallow on bass, Stu Martin on drums, and the leader on vibraphone. Burton’s group, like that of Jeremy Steig, is working toward a distillate compounded of rock and roll and jazz, but these important explorations were only fitfully apparent. Coryell and Burton played an intricate duet, using a variety of rhythms, and in a slow blues Coryell, who is the first great hope on his instrument since Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt, hit on one of those seemingly stumbling but perfectly executed phrases—several barely audible behind-the-beat single notes followed by silence and a leaping, brilliant run—that Charlie Parker coined. Earl Hines, accompanied by Bill Pemberton (bass), Oliver Jackson (drums), and Budd Johnson, just about matched his Friday-night performance, and in a slow ballad he indulged in a bit of cheerful vaudeville; he played an introduction and then gave way to Johnson, who, though nowhere in sight, could be heard thunderously from the loudspeakers. It was the Lord calling from backstage. At twelve o’clock, Buddy Rich appeared with his big band, and the pumpkin turned into a golden coach. Rich started with a medium blues, soared through Bill Holman’s ingenious arrangement of the McCartney-Lennon “Norwegian Wood,” and went on to his display number, the “Bugle Call Rag.” His solo was a wonder. It incorporated a section in which his left hand moved at a thousand r.p.m.s on his snare while his right han
d floated casually back and forth between his tomtoms, a long, diminuendo roll that sank to barely audible knitting-needle clicking on his snare rims, and a zowie Big Bertha climax. No sooner was the number over than Rich, bowing and sweating, launched into what appeared to be an introductory twelve-bar solo in medium tempo, reared back, and said, “What’ll we play?” It was a throwaway gag, but it was also an incredible little solo, a perfect solo. Gillespie then ambled onstage and blew a dozen choruses of blues with the band, and for the final number, an eleven-minute version of “West Side Story,” he climbed into the trumpet section, whispered to the other trumpeters, yawned, peered elaborately at the sheet music, and ogled and shouted at Rich, who, his hands two windmills in a high wind, never batted an eye.
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