256
PARTISAN REVIEW
right and in his startling contrast to Dylan Thomas. ("We've nothing
vast to offer you, no deserts/ Except the waste of thought/ Forming
from mind erosion.") It looks as if the mood represented by these
writers has taken over, for the writers of the '30s like Spender and Leh–
mann are drifting into reminiscence and Mr. Graham Greene is busy
bucking for his Nobel Prize with comic-strip portraits of subhuman
"quiet Americans" set in contrast to favorable portraits of himself as
a murdering good European.
Perhaps it is some mistaken by-product of this new mood which
makes London theatrical audiences enthusiastic about the streamlined
tin-pan-alley sentimentality of American musical comedies. There is,
incidentally, one really funny review in London, Robert Dhery's
La
Plume de ma Tante,
which reaches its climax when an uproarious parody
of a strip-tease finds the stage manager trying to argue the artiste into
removing a set of heavy winter underwear; when she finally gets his
point, she gives the audience a startled glance, throws her hands in the
air, and cries, "They must be crazy!"
The inexplicable enthusiasm for American musicals apart, the Lon–
don theater is characteristically English. Its prices are reasonable, its
tickets easy to get, its theaters conveniently located; but its decor is
unretouched Victorian and its heating something left over from Prinny's
heyday. Its acting is of very high quality and its music usually a tape–
recording faintly heard behind the clatter of static emitted by a neurotic
loudspeaker. Its best work consists of a great deal of Shakespeare and
a small amount of excellent experimental stuff. The Peter Brook
Hamlet
with Paul Scofield, which was received with supreme politeness in Mos–
cow last fall, is very popular. Scofield is the nearest thing to John
Barrymore since the '20s. He is exceedingly handsome, has a magnificent
though mannered voice, and sends his personality rolling out over the
audience in waves. Unfortunately he plays
Hamlet
as if he had it mixed
up with
Rebel without a Cause.
The Old Vic's Shakespeare productions
are conventional and their director, Michael Benthall, delights in mean–
ingless pauses and sharply contrasted shouts and murmurs, but the com–
pany has some fine actors and there
is
a good deal to be said for pro–
ductions of Shakespeare in which the producer is not busy imposing
some silly "original" interpretation of his own on the play. The Old
Vic is a great comfort after John Gielgud's foam-rubber
Lear
where
the ludicrous production and Gielgud's performance, with its insistence
that Lear is hopelessly senile, gave Shakespeare's play as tough a fight
to survive as it can ever have faced.
