The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 13

13 At the Theatre At the Films THE OBSERVER, SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1954 i PURPLE HEDDA By KENNETH TYNAN TERRORISM By C. A. LEJEUNE 1 great deal of the background music, particularly the gluey' ballad before the titles, which 'seemed to me an intrusion in a fine1 film. Theflight romantic comedy at the Plaza, rSabtfaa Fair, shows" how. the daughter of a proud British chauffeur finds the can bring herself to marry one of her father's 'millionaire American employers.

The only question is, which shall it be? The drylffstick elder brother interests iseemlo lie, exclusively in plastics, 'or-, the spark of a younger (William whom Sabrina has adored since. childhood shrewd enough to keep Galleries centrepiece is Peggy Ash-croft's Hedda, a flinty, marvellously impartial performance. How many temptations this actress resists 1 She makes no play for sympathy; nor does she imply that she despises the woman she is impersonating. Her vocal mannerisms, cool and tinkling as teaspoons twirled, in china cups, are exactly fitted to Hedda's malice; and the whole display is a monument to nymphomanie de tele, which might roughly be translated as the nymphomania of Hedda. The Old Vic "Macbeth" offers nothing as good.

Mr. Benthall's production is a bellowing-match, with every other word, how harmless soever its meaning, spat in a pet at the audience's face. My impression was of an. operatic transcription of the cartoons of Mr. Charles Addams.

One of the play's few quiet lines, It will be rain to-night," fell from the mouth of Mr. Eric Porter's Banquo like manna on the starved. Miss Rachel Roberts is the best witch for years; Mr. John Wood's Lennox cuts like a razor through the stubble of fustian; and Miss Ann Todd makes a piercing Lady Macbeth. As her distracted helpmeet, Mr.

Paul Rogers amalgamates all the vital characteristics of the First, Second and Third Murderers. The part needs lungs plus genius; Mr. Rogers does all that lungs can, and. is at his best in the last act. which he plays all out for wild white hair and bellicose ecstasy.

FOR BUSINESSMEN 1ET me court peril with a generalisation: that good Jf drama, of whatever kind, has but one mainspring the human being reduced by ineluctable process to a state of desperation. Desperate are the cornered giants of Sophocles; desperate, too, as they huddle in their summer houses, the becalmed gentry of Chekhov; and the husband of French farce, with a wife in one bedroom and a mistress in another, is he not, though we smile at his agony, deflnably desperate The clown in the haunted house and the prince on the haunted battlements have this in common, that their drama heightens as they are driven to the last ditch of their souls. How, in this extremity, will they comport themselves It is to find out that we go to theatres: to Hedda Gabler at, the Lyric, Hammersmith, or to Macbeth at the Old Vic. What a match, one muses, would these two fiends have made Hedda is all rapacious sterility, a perfect embodiment of the philosophy of de Sade, which Mr. Geoffrey Gorer has described as one of "pleasure in the ego's modification of the external world." Power over life is what she and Macbeth seek, and he achieves it with the satanic flourish, the vine-leaves in his hair," to which Eilert Lovborg could never aspire.

It is for Macbetn's world that a locust at large in a grove of Pooters, perennially pines. One knows with what ballast Sardou would have loaded her story. Ignored by an ageing husband, she would have seduced, an ex-lover (Lovborg), lost him to another woman and blackmailed him into suicide. Shamed by the nobility of Tesman's forbearance, she would then have killed herself to atone." Ibsen takes this raw meat and Iiberately removes" the romantic element. Hedda's destructiveness springs not from passion but from sexual frigidity.

Not otherwise would she marry Tesman, whom Mr. George Devine plays with an exquisite, lumbering donnishness; not otherwise repel the advances of Brack (Mr. Micheal MacLiammoir. a trifle uneasy in the mysteries of cicis-beism): not otherwise stiffen at every mention of motherhood, or burn Eilert Lovborg's manuscript, his child by Mrs. Elvsted.

Hedda Gabler is what Hazlitt called Kemble, an icicle upon the bust of traeedv pro duction is the finest tribute 10 Ibsen since Mr. Michael Benthall's Wild Duck in 1948. Your weather-beaten British playgoer, who likes his entertainment warmed by the blue skies of Verona. Nice pr Siam, has immemorially shunned Ibsen, witn his grim goloshes and abiding rain. Aware of this, Mr.

Ashmore's designers, Motley, have dulcified Hedda's habitat the Tesman villa is a costly pleasance. baked in a blinding sun. Mr. Alan Bade! gives Lovborg the right- ring of hollow-ness. and Miss Rachel Kempson, though scarcely a slender little thing with pretty, soft features," manages the pathos of Mrs.

Elvsted by sheer, rawboned acting. The Innocence WALLIS being among the most intriguing features- this year. One mosaic, in particular, a bov's Drodicious Cat in translucent green and blue, fragments, which at once suggests Picasso 'at play, is actually closer to medieval stained glass; there perhaps one hits on a truth, that contemporary parallels, are superficial and the vitality of. child art is more truly akin to the naive wonder and affection of medieval craftsmen. The magical vision of Christopher Wood, which so greatly affected romantic painting in the forties, may still delight us with or without the knowledge that it came, to be artificially incited.

His last evocations of Ireboul are, indeed, among the most ravishing of his paintings at the Red-' fern, which remind one also how susceptible he was to contemporary French influences in his earlier years. In the next room Mr. Paul Feiler's firm abstractions, derived from Italian or Cornish harbours, are thickly plastered with blues, greys and clotted cream to give a semblance of aerial survey maps, but might easily have been painted anywhere else. Finally, let me commend some lovely, things at the Gallery from the collection of Mrs. Lucy Wertheim, an impulsive but also perceptive, patron, of Christopher Wood, Frances Hodgkins, arid other romantics.

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FOR THE RIGHT ANSWERS CALL IN The Pet Shop (St. Martin's), Mr. Warren Chethara-Strode poses a somewhat recondite question: should an unmarried mother adopt her child in order to conceal its illegitimacy The first act, in which Miss Adrianne Allan, a suavely pregnant matron. Rives up her job at a boys' school, is perhaps a vestigial remnant of an earlier draft, since it contains two interesting characters who never reappear. Twenty years later the child has grown up into Miss.

Constance Wake, in a fever of 1-don't-wanl-to-be-a-might-have-been. The scene a faire, in which she discovers her bastardy, is conceived as if the in-tormation to be imparted were that she had a touch of leprosy. Understandably, several members of the cast aged more convincingly during the second interval than during the first: even Miss Barbara Everest was visibly conquered. The denouement, which concerns Miss Wake's elopement with a character who never jppearsdLaJj'. is bedecked with cliche; and 1 will leave you wondering, like Mr.

Coward's Half-Caste Woman, what the end will be. The incidence of chicken-pox in the French Alps is an orasinal farcical- which Miss Kay Bannerman and Mr. Harold Brooke so strenuously develop in All For Mary (Duke of York's) that it becomes a minor plague. Two maculate and quarantined Englishmen are persecuted by a tireless London nanny: on this, the play's best part. Miss Kathleen Harrison casts her spell of quiet scarecrow poetry.

Mr. David Tomlinson plays Exasperation, almost in the abstract, and Miss Betty Paul does the same for Winsomeness. As others see lis: above, an adult imagined by eight-year-old Angela Lewstey, at the R.I. Galleries. Right: a child sten by Mr.

Lewin Bassingthwaighte, at the Leicester. At the Songs of By NEVILE JT the Royal Institute Galleries there is a drawing of a head crowned with grasses by a girl of fourteen, which is reproduced on the catalogue of the Sunday Pictorial's" annual exhibition, of Children's Art. Artless in the sense that the young artist could hardly have visualised its effect, this near-doodle seems nevertheless to epitom ise the most sophisticated art of Paris. Elsewhere there is a boy's visioiv of a volcano erupting, with people hurrying out of houses from which flames are leaping, that conveys the panic atmosphere as directly and almost as forcibly as a Munch. Where is the dividing line, one wonders before such extraordinary products, between childish and adult achievement? Some eminent modern artists have, as we know, preserved a childlike fancv and freshness of vision, but the mature experience behind the brush can usually be sensed, and anyhow is bound to be recognised in the consistent purpose revealed in any collection of the artist's work.

Here the flashes are in the pan, and one may notice, for example, the variableness of a group of landscapes by a prize-winner, John Brooke, whose remarkable painting by the Stpur is the expression of a probably irrevocable mood. This is one of the products of a week's painting round Flatford Mill arranged for twelve pupils, their holiday work, together with the carvings, and a number of mosaics. Music I the play to be performed in Spanish I demanded. was the reply, and on that account every person is so eager to go; which would not be the case if it were in a language which they could understand (George Borrow. "The Bible in Spain," chap, xxviii.) This case of a Portuguese play given ifi Spain was no doubt an acute one.

That of opera in this country is, we all know, chronic; it is also beyond any simple, universal remedy. We do not' know precisely what we want. There are people who groan under the affliction of having to listen to their own language al Covent Garden, yet will not only think it quite natural, but perfectly delightful, to hear Carmen in German at Munich or Elektra in French in Paris. Then we have the Glyndebourne school, whose first rule is that everything should be done in the original, though this has led to our getting Ariadne in German with only two German artists in minor parts and two works with French librettos. Alceste and Lc Comte Ory," with not a single singer whose own language is French, though that is the most difficult of all the idioms generally current to be managed convincingly by foreigners, while everybody can get on tolerably with Italian or German.

Even so, we approve of the Glyndebourne policy, though we must resign ourselves to the fact that it is bound to restrict the repertory: we shall never, for instance, be given a work by Jancek or Bart6k there. We approve, certainly, but can reasonably do so only because Glyndebourne goes in for special festival That we should continue to have such performances at Covent Garden too from time to time, with eminent visiting artists singing in their own languages, is very much to be desired, not only because we enjoy them. Language in Opera By ionepguessing -almost to the- lasta 'minute. There isn't i much- substance in Sabrina. Fair," but in its" slight it.

makes for very pleasing entertain- ment. Audrey. Hepburn, the-darling of Roman Holiday," plays Sabrina i as a bewitching, cross between a wide-eyed sprite and a "wiry Ronald Sdarle'girl. Humphrey Bogart shows resources of quiet "comedy as the business man. whose idea of music appropriate for romance is an old record.

of "Yes, We, Have No -Bananas," and John Williams' makes of the dignified 'chauffeur a driving gentleman's 1 gentleman' quite in the Jeeves class. VE are told that Demetrius and the Gladiators (Odeon, Marble Arch) begins where The Robe left, off." In of fact, the last scene of The Robe is shown before the titles of Demetrius the condemned; cen-' tiirion and his bride go to meet their doom, lending the robe to "the Big Fisherman for safe keeping. In the newrfilm, the freed Demetrius (Victor Mature), is captured by Roman soldiers during a search for the robe. Sentenced to a' school for a his large frame (extra large in CinemaScope) catches the roving eye ot Messalina (Susan Hayward), the Emperor's young aunt by marriage. he.is required to face, not onlydeath in the arena in the' shape of gladiators and tigers, but a fate worse flhin death from Messalina, whose 1 career 'seems to begone long' round of bed'and circuses.

'-J Barry by an almost superhuman effort;" manages to make something t. of the perplexed and scholarly, Claudius. Other--; wise, the' film strikes me as tasteless, noisyT banal, brutal and in almost every way to be deplored. The artless Italian film called The Singing City (Marble Arch Pavilion) deals with the sorrows of a Neapolitan- sailor, -Giacomo. His tenor voice has won the, heart of Maria, a -shipowner's daughter, but her- harsh' parent insists upon her marriage with Mr.

a non-singer. Discouraged, Giacomo finds fame with a musical comedy company in which he" is -the' only vocalist, and temporary consolation 'with Nadia', 'the voluptuous leading lady. The singer: js played by Giacomo -Rondinello. The ladies sung at are Maria Fiore," rather domes-bound at, a window, and Nadia Gray, relaxed, on rock; with mermaid's tail. I hold every ughs OON.

after the war an; American newspaperman, Malcolm -wrote -a series of articles called "Crime on the Waterfront" for the New York which won him: the Pulitzer PrizeforRe-porting, is said, prompted a State investigation into his dis- coveries. Not long afterwards a Jesuit priest, Father Conidan, long known for his great work on behalf of longshoremen oLthe Port of New sent out a pamphlet reprinting one of thd -articles, and passionately denouncing the gang system that, was holding-the docks under a reign of terror. Where I was "cautious 'and merely Father Corridan blasted," Johnson. Their joint disclosure's form the basis of 'the script which' Budd Schulberg has written for On' the Waterfront (Gaumont); one of the grimmest and- most formidable films about organised "crime Jsince Hollywood turned its attackupon Al Capone" and his men. Tfar-film has had the good luck' to be directed by Elia; Kazan, and to get Marlon Brando as its leading player.

The story that Mr. Schul- berg and Mr. Kazan have put together deals with longshoreman -who has grown up in. the' knowledge, which he has come-; passively to accept, that the healthiest people on the waterfront who see nolhing, hear nothing and say nothing of what is going on around them. Although no brighter than his neighbours, there is a strain of" something- dogged in him, and gradually and painfully he is brought to through -love and a series, of brutal accidents," that the protective 'System to which he has, subscribed is nothing but a form of terrorism.

It will surprise me very much indeed if a finer performance than Brando's is seen on the screen this year; the character, grows achingly, under your eyes. Karl as the' battling priest who. dares to believe that the hold of, a 'ship', be-; side the body of a murdered is as good a. place for a sermon as any, The newcomer, Eva Marie Saint, has A face with thought in it as' well as beauty. I have only two.

complaints to make about the film, and both' are small. It struck me as rather alarmingly inconclusive, which is perhaps be 1 wondered. at, for reformation, if it is to be stable, must come slowly'. I And I could have done without a. ERIC BLOM alleged unsingability of our language, and, with better reason.

They not be. We must' demand that they should be good, just as we ask that the music of. an, opera should be good. If a work is musically too bad to perform, we.leave it alone, and if a translation is insufficient, we must get.a new and try if that, will not Sadler's Wells opened a new season this. fast week with a produc-.

tion of Tdsca" by Dennis Arundell' that was interesting and thoughtful so far as 'the story bears thinking about and a lively one of "Don Pusquale" in Osbert Lancaster's delicious. settings. It would be more than ridiculous at that' theatre, which has made opera so much more widely popular than it used to be. to use any language but English, and indeed it has so many British artists of quality that things continue to go very well. But.

of course, the translations demand constant and they get it. of Don Pasquale is clear and witty, and the patter duet for Pasquale and Malatcsta proves that skilfully used, comes off the tongue without twisting it even at the fastest -possible pace. The "Tosca" translation" seiems to be an older one reasonably revised and thus made acceptable, though 1 was almost sorry tp. miss classic opening line of Angelotti's Ah, I have boulked' them. Dread imagination made me quake with uncalled-for perturbation." Two new appeared, Alexander Gibson and Leo.Quayle, both promising; "the casts contained more commendable artists than I can cnumerate'here; and what with the novelty; of Berkeley's." a new production- of "The Magic Flute" and-mbre doubtfully 'valuable-the acquisition of Menotti's "The Consul," we may; look forward to an eventful season at London's second but not always secondary opera-house.

A Moliere Comedy VE all want to be something more than we are, or should; so perhaps snobbery, 'a by-product of divine discontent, is. least harmful of human vices. Moliere' Bourgeois Gentilhomme is consequently the least odious of his scapegoats, and the comedy to which he gives his name is the least grim, with the fewest -undercurrents of horror and tragedy. The gulf never once gapes at our feet Besides, Le Bourgeois 'Gentilhomme is- more than half a ballet. This production of this early work of Moliere's, brought to Edinburgh's Lyceum Theatre by the Comidie-Francaise for the last week of the Festival, is altogether charming.

The Monsieur Jourdain of Louts Seigner is like a ripe peach dropping off the wall with delight that the sun of nobility should shine upon him: he is an absolute dear. Nagged by his irascible wife and maid. Miles Andree de Chauveron and Beatrice Bretty, flattered by his supercilious masters of dancing and music, MM. Jacques Charon and Jacques Rameau, ragged by the pseudo-Turkish emissaries, MM. jean and Jean Meyer, he emerges unscathed and ebullient from his ordeal by laughter.

Marjory Middleton's nimble corps de ballet weave a deft web around him as neatly as if they had been dancing galliards at the Theatre Moliere from the cradle upwards. The plain but splendid setting of Suzanne Lalique forms an ideal background to the ordered behaviour of the brightly dressed characters; and the unmistakably Louis-Quinze armchairs perhaps the only French furniture to be found in the northern Athens were the only mistake in a production impregnated with style. Richard Bucelb. urro man a debtor to 16th Century German Engraving his profession FRANCIS BACON (1361-162 Whatever the pleasure Player's complete it 9 A BJi but also because they. set standards, such as must be upheld in a metropolis.

Also, I am the first to welcome the Vienna State Opera's decision to give us the three great Italian Mozart operas in the original at the Royal Festival Hall this week, as. I was. I think, the most emphatic to object to their doing them in German during their last visit to London. But. here again is an exceptional festive occasion that makes all the.

difference. There is no objection at all to German performances of Figaro" Don Giovanni and "Cosl fan German-speaking countries, and the sooner we recognise that foreign opera-houses which cultivate their art on a laigc scale can do so. only in a way to appeal to everybody, not just to a small' class of connoisseurs, the better. "Ah." I can hear somebody say, but English is so unsingable Is it Certainly bad English is, but so, of course, is bad German. Here are three passages in German works which I defy anybody to match with anything more awkward and ugly in English Schubert (Ungeduld) Auf jeden wciswn Zeltel rnocht' ich's schrciben Weber (Freischiitz) Docb tauscht das Ucht des Monds tnich Strauss (Arabella) Ich lass' dich nicht im Stich." A translation may not always fit the music ideally or reproduce the original sense, quite happily, but, on the other hand, it has the chance' of smoothing out such horrors as may occur in it'.

Dent's rendering of the Freischiitz passage, for instance Heavens Does the moon deceive my eyes -may not be to every body's taste, but it does avoid the frightful repeated hissings of the German line, and it is more clearly intelligible when sung. "Oh, but so many English translations of librettos are so bad." This is even more often urged than the AT EDINBURGH worker's nocturne, subtle and sensitive in its low key. The large American contribution ranged in style from the intense, -deeply felt Time Out of War, with its Civil War setting and pointed message for to-day, to the poetic vision of 3rd Are. EL, set in New York. The Netherlands entry, headed by Herman van der Horst's brilliantly edited trawler-fishing study, Lekko was distinguished by fine film craftsmanship, and among the younger film-making countries New Zealand made an excellent showing with three superbly photographed films of the countryside.

Walt Disney, a regular contributor, showed the first of a new series on peoples and places." Alaskan Eskimo, a record assembled with patient care and blessedly free from facetiousness in the commentary. In range and quality the films generally have exceeded the achievement of recent years. The strong American entry included three films showing or about to be shown in London The Caine Mutiny, On the Waterfront, and Salt of the Earth. Russia sent Trio Ballet and a delightful children's film. Chuk and Gck.

The Czechoslovakian films took obvious pride in the country's arts and natural life. France showed Ripening Seed, an adaptation of Colette's novel of sexual awakening. Le Bid en Herbe," movingly acted and sensitively directed by Claude Autant-Lara. Sweden sent an impressive colour film of industrial achievement. The Story of Stora, and.

in complete contrast. As In Dreams, a fantastic adaptation of the Prometheus legend, whose meaning remained elusive even after the director's introductory explanation. But every festival should have one such enigma. Forsyth Hardy Festival Films ITS THE TOBACCO WX86I For FLY QAtJTAS WORLD ROUTES Every man i a debtor to the world: to his parents; his schoolmaster; his friends end employers. He owes them his existence; his knowledge; bis happiness and his daily bread.

To his profession, he has another debt: that due to generations past whose integrity and skill have given bis calling the reputation it enjoys. To them he owes his status as a worker and a thinker. Profession carries a wider meaning now than it did once and professional status, in common talk, is extended to many functions in industry and commerce. But it is not won lightly a long record of public responsibility, and private service, must come first. How can such a debt be repaid Only by handing on still higher standards and a higher status than those of yesterday, to the makers of industry to-morrow.

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AUSTRALIA'S OVERSEAS AIRLINE UWCIATION lW 4 t.O.A.C AMD IW HTHE closing week of the Edin-burgh Film Festival has produced some authentic examples of The Living Cinema," now the accepted definition of the scope of the event. Prima dl Sera, a comedy with a gentle moral from Italy by Piero Tellini, author of the memorable Four Steps in the Clouds," has shown that the vein of neo-realism, so successfully opened up by the post-war Italian directors, is not worked out. No Way Back, a story of the hazards of East-Wesl romance, set in war-ruined Berlin and resourcefully directed by Victor Vicas, suggests that Germany may again become a force to reckon with in European cinema. Similar in theme to The Young Lovers, also shown at the festival, the German film is urgent and dramatic where Asquith's film is lyrical and poetic. Welcome, Mr.

Marshall, a gay Spanish joke at the expense of Marshall Aid, displays a promising light satiric touch in its author-director. Luis G. Berlanga, and is rich in comic invention a festival highlight from a country whose films are seldom seen in Britain. The desired qualities of freshness and vitality have not been found only or primarily in the longer films. Canada, whose documentaries have set the pace in recent years, was again represented by a stimulating group of films, including Corral, which relies on the camera exclusively to tell a story of the rounding-up of a spirited young horse, and Paul Tomkowlcz, a tramway First ISights To-morrow Vienna Stale Opera opens (Festival Hall) The Mikado (Savoy).

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