Theatre/W A growing familiarity both with the Nor wegian idiom and the vast staging problems {Peer Gynt was initially a closet drama) makes both bold in his decisions and confident in his orchestration. The boldest decision, which in retro spect has the simplicity of the perfect solution, is to cast three actors in the title role: Michael Siberry as the young romantic of the first act; Neil Fitzpatrick as the sybaritic capitalist of the second act; and Brian James as the lost old man of the third. There are also three Solveigs: Michelle Stayner, Christine Mahoney and D aphne Grey. The second bold decision, having made the first, is not to impose a coherent style upon the text but to dramatise its diversity. The advantage of the first decision is a tripling of the energy resources for a role beyond the stam ina of most actors; and of the second a store of surprises within a picaresque framework. At the same time Hugh Colman’s design and Nigel Levings’ lighting are spare, erupting only now and then into bursts of extravagance; allowing a continuing flow of movement through the many scenes and making strong demands upon the audiences’s imagination in the m anner of poetic drama. A further advantage of the diversity was a real sense of the parochial stuffiness, ignorance and selfishness which Grieg’s music has softened and which Ibsen was to attack more blackly in later plays. Here it is pointed up ironically in a way admirably captured by Norman Ginsbury’s informal translation. The play opens with the cast in rehearsal dress doing a warm-up, during which they lay down ground rules for the audience. For the first act the stage is almost bare and grey as we meet the impetuous young dreamer and his gullible mother Aase, watch him kidnap a bride from her wedding for a dare and meet the pure soul Solveig. As in The Wizard o f Oz, the imaginary world proves more colourful than the real, though the boundary between black and white and technicolour are not so clear. The source of this act in Norwegian folklore is made very clear: Michelle Stayner’s Solveig has a trans parent goodness which disdains sentimen tality; and D aphne Gray’s Aase, which must be one of the very finest perform ances she has ever given, is a wonderfully real, vulnerable peasant whose comedy derives from her being real, not from her being a peasant. Her famous death-bed scene which ends Act One, in which Peer drives her in a sleigh to the gates of Heaven, commands belief. But economy of the staging only dramatises the grotesque sexual fantasies represented by the Troll kingdom as the inhabitants burst on stage like a Heironymus Bosch portrait of Hell. The images of flesh and guilt combine until they form a philosophy of selfishness which carries Peer through to the end of the play. Following Act One the curtain rise on Act Two could not be more unexpected. Here are all that 19th century stage mechanics can offer: a proscenium arch encrusted with cherubim; a beach on (Continued on page 40) _____ 32
THEATRE AUSTRALIA SEPTEMBER 1978
Double nostalgia trip T H E G H O ST TR A IN _______ COLLIN O’BRIEN The Ghost Train by Arnold Ridley. National Theatre, Play house, Perth, WA. Opened 4 August 1978. Director, E dgar M a tc a lfa ; Designer, Sua R usaall; Lighting, D u ncan O rd; Stage Manager, C h ris tin a R a n d all. Saul Hodgkin, L as lla W rig h t; Richard Winthrop. M artin Jon as; Elsie Winthrop, R o sam ary B a rr; Charles Murdock, A lan F la tc h a r; Peggy Murdock. M a rrin C a n n in g ; Miss Bourne, M a rg a ra t Fo rd ; Teddie Deakin, R o bert Van M a c k e le n b e rg ; Julia Price. Laone M a rtin -S m ith ; Herbert Price, A n dy K ing; John Sterling, Ivan K ing; Jackson, R o bert F a g g e tte r; Smith, O auoge Tso usls.
The Ghost Train is a mystery thriller written between the wars: in 1925 to be precise, the year Britain went off the Gold Standard and was building itself up with Malcolm Fraser style prekeynesian economic policies to the General Strike of 1926. An appropriate time for escapist drama. Realism /naturalism was not merely the dominant dram atic form, it was virtually the only acceptable one; and of course the mystery thriller with its fundamentally realistic mode and its underlying n atural istic philosophy (ie every phenomenon has a rational explanation, therefore whodunit is a question which must have an answer) is a clear setup for such a dram atic formula. As dram a it is nevertheless a spinoff from the novel, indeed many of the plays were rewrites of novels, notably those of A gatha Christie. This was an age when she, not Ellery, was Queen, when Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Whimsey stalked the land. As with most literary genres it is interesting to look back just to note how unreal, artificial, downright arbitrary are the unbreakable rules of any artistic form. In the English whodunit, for instance, sex never reared its ugly head (so to speak). Well, it was a reason for killing somebody, but not for jum ping into bed with them. T hat m ust mean something, but I shudder to contemplate what. The more vulgar Americans did go in for themes such as Blondes D o n ’t Kill, and eventually went on to more explicit sex, finally to the shafting of Shaft. But in the English thrillers everyone was so dam n polite and knew their place, there was no room for even the mildest radicalism. The fantasies were built on an accepted class structure from the Hall to the cottage via the vicarage. Astutely, someone once described it all as Snobbery with Violence. But I digress. The Ghost Train was a nostalgia trip in another sense as well. All we longstanding Stagedoor Johnnies, critics and other ticks and parasites on the body theatrical were remembering back to director Edgar M etcalfe’s first production in the Play house in 1963. That, too, was a mystery thriller, The Cat and the Canary, with which Edgar showed us that he not only commanded the nuts and bolts of directing but had a flair for style as well. I can still recall the Jazz Age Boop-a-Doop poses the
girls froze into in moments of terror, surprise or whathaveyou; but even more that marvellous moment when Ron G raham threw wide a wardrobe door and the pokerstiff corpse of Peter Collingwood began its slow descent to flat on its face to Ron’s cry of “ Good Lord! Benson!” or words to th at effect. Precisely located between the Collingwood shoulderblades was a knife with a handle of oriental design. Ah, we don’t see enough of that sort of thing nowadays, do we Jeremy? No, now its all get-your-gear-off and whatabout-the-workers. W ith The Ghost Train Edgar proved that he hasn’t lost his touch. The play is set on a remote, deserted Cornish railway station, and we were treated at curtain-up to a spooky red light through the windows and a shaky-voiced version of “ Rock of Ages” . Next a highly realistic train into the station, conveyed by a series of carriagewindow lights passing and slowly stopping outside the windows, a device which rightly drew applause. You don’t get th at sort of effect at the RSC, mate. It would break all the rules to tell you who done it, although I can say it wasn’t the butler, as there wasn’t one. Suffice it to say th at the plot is built around six passengers from that train stranded on the station at the grudging mercies of an aged stationm aster, a nicely gummy Mumerset performance by Leslie W right. Enter later two supposedly respectable upperclass but rather sinister figures (Ivan and Andy King) and a hysterical lady, given appro priate staring eyes and tense musculature by Leonie M artin-Smith. Oh, I forgot to tell you who the six stranded characters are — and to tell that is to tell all. First a cold, Cowardy sophisticate (Rosemary Barr) and her rather austere husband (M artin Jones), their m arriage on the rocks but stiff upper lip (if nothing else) all round; next a newlywed couple (Merrin Canning and Alan Fletcher) he, in the English theatrical tradition, the more coy with a tendency to get his adam ’s apple mixed up with his tie, she a M odern Miss who just might fla u n t herself; a sillyass Englishman, Bertie Wooster on holiday, all monocle and Oxford bags (Robert Van Mackelenberg); and finally an ageing spinster with a parrot (M argaret Ford). Need I say more? As upperclass twit of the year M r Van M ackelenberg could easily have stolen the show, b u t sharp-eyed direction and selfdiscipline cut off the possibility, but it was a finely tuned performance. M argaret Ford had a marvellous instant-drunk lazzi, and otherwise all forces combined mag nificently together. The play is not terribly well written, even for the genre, and a straight send-up would have become quickly boring; but Edgar and his cast managed that nice balance between parody and playing it for real which kept us both am used and on the edge of our seats. All in all, an enjoyable evening in the theatre.