286
PARTISAN
The English past is represented
by
Archie's father,
a
dreamy
old "entertainer"
who
is
always
giving his dignified,
tirement speech.
"I feel
sorry
for you people. You don't know what it's really like.
haven't lived most of you. You've never known what it was like,
all miserable really."
And Archie's tired wife, who drinks too much, and shows
qualities of the lower middle class in English which seem to endure
long as the breath holds out. About the Duchess of Porth, this '
boozy wife says, or can
still
say, "I suppose it's a bit silly, but I've
taken an interest in her. Oh, ever since she was quite young. I feel
must be
very
nice somehow."
These characters are not triumphs of dramatic composition;
are flattened out for the stage like so many pairs of pajamas put
LHlIl1UI(J_
a mangle. They stand for anger, despair, nostalgia, distracted
in the same way that the gin bottle stands for joy, and personal
sibility is represented by urgings to "eat a little something." Still
one has his moment or two and Osborne's dialogue is brisk and
enough to carry them along. The whole play is Archie Rice; it is
strange creation of Osborne's and not the meaning to be got from
decline of the music hall art that gives this work its
character.
So far as the music hall is concerned, Osborne says in his
to the printed text, "The music hall is dying, and with it, a
~'.>:UUJ""""
part of England." He dedicates the play to A.C. "who remembers
it was
like,
and will not forget it; who, I hope, will never
let
me
it...." But he has resisted the temptation to use the musio h3.11
"""HJU._
ously or to pad his play with jokes and songs. The music hall
are just as grubby, just as unrelieved, just as appalling as the Rice
ment where the rest of the action takes place. "Tatty backcloths,"
most antique and hopeless jokes, the scabby, dreary indolence of
act: these brief moments of "entertainment" simply stagger the
with their tonelessness, their deathly hoarseness. These tawdry turns, these
leers, and above all the terrible, terrible fatigue, the exhausted laughter:
no doubt this is the proper requiem for the death of the folk arts.
Archie Rice is the same empty, callous, bored master of ceremonies
at home that he is in front of his
ROCK'N ROLL NEW'D LOOK
back.
drop at the theatre. Callousness, not bullying, is the mark of
this
incredible father and husband-he is as dry as an old lemon rind.
"Why
should I care? Why should I let it touch me?" he croaks in one of
his
