Old and New in London Now

OLD AND NEW IN LONDON NOW CRITICAL JARGON-HIGHBROW AND PHILISTINE-iS one of the things parodied in Tom Stoppard's new one-act comedy, The Real Inspector H ound/ and it would require some courage to parrot, even approximately , Moon, the second-string critic, who makes this pronouncement about the Agatha Christie-type thriller he has just been watching (from the far side of the stage where another 'audience' confronts the audience): If we examine this more closely, and I think close examination is the best tribute that the play deserves, I think we will find that within the austere framework of what is seen to be on one level a country-house weekend, and what a useful symbol it is, the author has given us-yes, I will go so far-he has given us the human condition. We need not then go so far as to see in the two-level action of the play "the human condition." On the contrary, the play's interest may well lie in the cheerful and seemingly amoral way in which it makes the theatre feed on the theatre withoug urging us to perceive the old analogies between the world and the stage. When, towards the end of the play, the two parodied critics one after another step on the stage, get sucked into the mad logic of a theatrical thriller and assume parts that lead to a quick death by revolver shot, nobody is likely to experience the "felt life" that is always there in Pirandello's theatricality; nor is one invited to recognize some social nightmare as in the somewhat over-obvious metamorphosis of logical-political man into Ionesco's rhinoceros. No-one, not even a critic, needs to feel involved beyond the level of a fine cerebral fal1ce. It is comfortingly classical, as though Sheridan's The Critic were performed in Alice's Looking Glass; and the element of absurdity in the play rests in the comfortingly witty dream where everything is topsy-turvy-the Inspector turns critic, the Critic inspector, and so on-and the words of a card-game are jumbled up into the familiar stage rhubarb. The point is that Stoppard is not only using absurd elements that pre-date the so-called theatre of the absurd, but he plays with the latterparodistically . The principle that the theatre breeds theatre (as art breeds art in Malraux's musee imaginaire) is exploited in this play, as it is in 1 Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound, Faber, 1968. First performance: Criterion Theatre, June 17, 1968. 437 438 MODERN DRAMA February Stoppard's more complex Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are DeadJ2 with exceptional formal consistency. But only the "formalism" is exceptional. Otherwise the new theatricality can be seen at work in more contemporary British plays than one can discuss here. It is a theatricality at once released and controlled by parody, total parody in the two plays by Stoppard just mentioned; elsewhere, as in A Day in the Death O'f Joe EggJ3 used as an escape from suff,ering, a mask; and it works like verbal strip cartoons directed against contemporary "trends" in Osborne's last two plays, particularly in Time Present.4 With this new parodistic art goes a moral relativism, as if the dramatist surveyed the world of action with something like a neutrally ironic god's eye-view; the medium is the vision, and the medium is theatrical language. There is a new efflorescence of stage rhetoric. The result is a kind of dramatic collage. Much of British drama since 1956 has been seen, in an oversimplified way, as a revival of naturalism, with Wesker, Shelagh Delaney, Rudkin and othersat times even Pinter and Osborne-being admired for their taperecording ear, for ,catching the authentic dialect of this or that tribe.5 But in the plays here discussed expressiveness comes before representation ; patterns are made up of gestures, and language is a game. Perhaps the interplay of pastiche rhetoric and contemporary odds and ends add up to what Levi-Strauss calls bricolage or pottering; the do-it-yourself element of all re-creation is stressed and displayed, and a play is there to play...