Two comments on the Stratford season: II: Contemporary Theatre at the Avon

more than his share of unrewarding roles, and who gave generously of his time in helping others to share his love of his craft and his skill in it. We owe him much. He will live in thousands of memories for his many superb performances, but it is very fitting that Stratford should be honouring him, and itself, with a newly established Leo Ciceri Fund to be used, as Mr. Ciceri would certainly have wished, to aid young theatre people. JI: Contemporary Theatre at the Avon B. W. JACKSON There was a good bit of loose talk about experimental theatre during the past summer at the Avon in Stratford. In the event, the three plays on view turned out to be not so much experimental as exotic: one Spanish, one English, one Polish. They were contemporary , certainly, but there's the rub. In a theatre where all is experiment, what is experimental? To quote an earlier playwright: Novelty is only in request, and it is as dangerous to be aged in any kind of course, as it is virtuous to be constant in any undertaking. This is not to disparage the experimental, but only to remark that the word has little meaning as a descriptive term in to-day's theatre. Take your average modern playwright , to be experimental is his sine qua non. His constancy in that undertaking may be numbered among his virtues. Fernando Arrabal has the Imagination of a court jester, playful, irreverent, mildly scatalogical. The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria is a happening in a giant sand-box tricked out to represent a desert island. Here the two actors who constitute the total cast of the piece cavort in a variety of guises and disguises to provide a rapid-fire commentary on the schizophrenia of civilized man. The sand-box at the Avon was provided by designer Jean Baptiste Manessier with a sympathetic eye for the land of make-believe that the play requires. Toy trees and other bits of attractively stylized tropical environment warned the audience against literal interpretation, and Gil Wechsler's lighting bathed the scene in the white glare of a noonday sun, turning the whole into an arena where there was no place to hide, and where the participants, allowed only the protection 18 of allegory, would have to tell it as it is. The two actors entrusted with the job struck me as remarkably competent. If the civilized individual is part con man and part bewildered adolescent, Mr. Arnold Soboloff, with his frenetic activity, his lightning shifts of personality, his longings and counterlongings , portrayed, for the uneasy contemplation of the audience, the temperamental uncertainties of so fragile a psyche. The sole survivor of an air crash, he arrives on Arrabal's island as a sort of cultural carpetbagger whose fancy it is to announce himself to the single inhabitant as the Emperor of Assyria, and to appoint his new companion as his chief architect. The primitive islander seems unconcerned at the suggestion that he accept political demotion in exchange for the prestige of professional appointment, and amiably consents to the arrangement. As time passes, the allegory thickens; the pair play out in a variety of disguises a series of games that look askance at the things men have to cope with, such as mothers, fathers, wives, friends, brothers, dogs, wars, religion, art and death. Throughout this phantasmagoria , Roger Blay, as the natural man, suggested stability, dignity, endurance, and hidden resources of power. This strength, in contrast to the febrile excitement of Mr. Soboloff, gave the impression that, although it was the Emperor, driven by his subjective fantasies, who was proposing the charades, it was the character of the architect that arranged their final disposition. For 'Emperor' read 'intellect,' for 'architect' read 'nature,' and you have one way of thinking about it. The play seemed both a trial and a confessional , with the Emperor as both defendant and penitent, the architect as both judge and confessor. At the end, the architect, upon request, dismembered the Emperor and ate him. This ritual cannibalism not only provided a symbolic union, but worked a mystic change: the Emperor leaping about in the sand as...