PARTISAN REVIEW
respectful comments about the sacred cows of Conservative England.
The major fault in the work-the minor flaws are its length, haphazard
plot, poor music and lyrics-is the superficial smartness of its "anger."
Osborne has ceased to deal with human beings and is here content with
shadowy types: the county, the well-heeled, the flash. He may not like
them, but he has nothing to offer in their place; Slickey's yearning for
decency is as vague and superficial as the evils he attacks. I suspect the
musical was prompted by Osborne's wandering guilt at his own enormous
success, his not quite realized anxieties on finding himself with a great
deal of money in a smart set he certainly does not like and probably
does not understand. So he has become preoccupied with smartness as
a value in itself until it has dictated the whole tone of the musical. One
hopes the phase is only transitory, that Osborne is not on the way to
becoming a Noel Coward of Socialism, but is simply casting around for
a route back to the more impersonal, unsmart world of creative activity.
Mercifully, smartness is not everywhere this spring. The Stratford
season opened with the first appearance there of the magnificent Paul
Robeson in
Othello.
The production, by the Royal Court's smartest
young director, Tony Richardson, is wretchedly mannered in the fashion–
able no-Iights-all-prose style. Iago is smartened up in another way; Sam
Wanamaker plays him as a kind of West Side Story tough, all grimaces
and mumbled lines. But Robeson, thank heaven, has none of this. He
is perhaps the least "smart" man in the theater. The non-political springs
of his work are pride and indignation. And he has interpreted Othello
in precisely that way: as a question of race and honor, not of sexual
jealousy. One may not agree with this as an interpretation of Shake–
speare's play, but as
Robeson's
play there is no arguing with it. The
strength and command of the man and the dignity of his acting are
such that one might as well argue with Jehovah.
Robeson has appeared opportunely. Once again racial tensions have
led to violence in the sad Notting Hill area. A Negro was knifed to
death-though more for his money, it is suggested, than for his color.
But the crime set off a great trail of accusations: against the Teddy
Boys who do the dirty work; against the various organizations that in–
spire them, from the League of Empire Loyalists to the Mosleyites, the
British Fascists who are once again surprisingly active-Mosley, in fact,
is threatening to stand for Parliament for North Kensington at the next
election; against the exploiting landlords who have been buying up
property in the area and then packing in Negro families in considerable
squalor and at exorbitant rents; against, finally, the usually impeccable
London police, who have been accused of racial partiality of such pro-
