Theater in London

THEATER IN LONDON THERE IS ONE MARVELOUS THING about the theater in London-the most expensive seat in the house is cheaper than the cheapest seat in a New York theater. In many theaters a gallery seat costs only the equi~ valent of 35 cents. There, unfortunately, the list of good things about the London theater ends. The West-end theaters produce for the most part trashy commercial vehicles, revues, and musicals-in short, pretty much the same thing as may be seen at any time in the Broadway theaters. But the New York theatergoer is never starved for good plays. There is always the off-Broadway theater with anywhere from ten to twenty little theaters presenting good drama-plays by promising new authors, avant-garde experimental theater, classics, and revivals of worthwhile failures which deserved a better fate. London has practically no counterpart to the off-Broadway theater. Only the Royal Court, the Theatre Royal, The Tower, and the Unity can compare with New York's live-wire theaters; and of these the latter two are non-professional. The Royal Court theater, which is well off the theatrical track in Chelsea, and the Theatre Royal, which is far out in East London, are both partially subsidized by the Arts Council. Both have done much to introduce new British authors to the public. The Theatre Royal was the first to produce Brendan Behan, now enjoying some success offBroadway with The Quare Fellow, and Shelagh Delany, whose A Taste of Honey is soon to receive a West-end production. The Royal Court holds a series of "Productions without Decor" and readings for its members and has so far introduced such promising new dramatists as N. F. Simpson, Donald Howarth, Arnold Wesker, Michael Hastings, John Arden, Ann Jellicoe, and Errol John. Its regular productions, open to the public, usually run fow' weeks and then transfer to a West-end theater if the reception warrants such a move; it rarely does. During my stay in London the Royal Court put on two plays. The first, Moon on a Rainbow Shawl by Errol John, is an excellently conceived play about a man's ruthless attempt to wrench himself out of his stifling environment, in this case Trinidad. The cast, headed by the American actor Earl Hyman, was by far the best I saw in London. The other production was The Long and the Short and the TaU by Willis Hall, a story about a doomed patrol of British soldiers in the Malayan jungle during the last war. This play was saved by its racy dialogue and by the excellent acting of an all-male cast. What little plot it has is trite and revolves around the reactions of the various members of the patrol to a Japanese prisoner whom they capture. I kept hoping that the Japanese prisoner would not take out pictures 47 48 MODERN DRAMA May of his wife and children (including one baby too young to be photographed but indicated by tenderly cradling anns), but he did. The Theatre Royal bowed to the almost mandatory English theatrical custom of doing a seasonal play at Christmas and did a wonderfully lively adaptation of A Christmas Carol while I was there. For me the high point of the production was the device used to close the first act. Scrooge steps out and glowers at the audience: "\Vhat are you laughing at? Well, stop it. Bah! (yells backstage) And ring down the curtain!" Christmas plays are a peculiarly British custom. Nowhere else is the hybrid creature known as pantomime to be found, fortunately. The pantomimes, based on the old fairy tale stories, vary from year to year as new gags are thought of and new topical jokes inserted, but there is one Christmas play which never changes. Where the Rainbow Ends was first produced forty-eight years ago and has remained popular at the Christmas season ever since. Not a word of the original script has ever been changed, and the purity of the text is jealously guarded by the heirs of the authors. So remarkably bad and so peculiarly English is this script that it deserves a few words of description. The first...