LONDON LETTER
253
full of corn. With unfaltering bad taste, he has gone light on the
epigrams and comedy and heavy on the purple
stuff-Salome, De
Profundis
(an embarrassing orgy of self-pity and special pleading),
and
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
(which seemed to have 584
stanzas-after hearing them all you realize what a good poet Kipling
was). He has even omitted what one might think the most dra–
matic of all Wilde's work-his testimony at the trials. Why then
the raptures? I think for the same reason Hal Holbrook's similar
pastiche,
Mark Twain Tonight,
recently enjoyed such success in
the United States: because each evokes a national past which is of
mythical potency today. The Civil War destroyed the frontier–
agrarian-democratic golden age which our middle classes yearn
back toward and the First World War destroyed the late Victorian
and Edwardian period of empire and stable class relationships which
still has such nostalgic attraction for theirs. That both Mr. Holbrook
and Mr. MacLiammoir are admired for presenting the most vulgar
and banal aspects of Twain and Wilde is one more illustration of
the importance of being midcult.
But the best play of the season was
Regina v. Penguin B,ooks
for publishing
Lady Chatterley's Lover.
It played to packed .houses
throughout its brief run at the Central Criminal Court. It was not
only first-class theater but it also had a weight of social implication
which no play since
Look Back in Anger
has achieved. It must
be
confessed that the Old Bailey is inadequate as a theater: the public
is
limited to a tiny balcony-the lucky fifty or sixty had queued up
for hours, with that patience the British show in such matters, ad–
mirable or contemptible depending on one's mood-and we of the
press were jammed in behind "the dock" (empty except for the
corporate spirit of Penguin Books, Ltd.), a glass and wood mon–
strosity that muffled the voices and concealed all but the heads of
the actors. But the effective costumes-those wigs and robes and
dickeys!-and the subtle underplaying (when one could hear it)
more than compensated. Also the fact that as heavy a pair of
vil–
lains as ever strode the boards-I refer to the Attorney for the
Crown, Mr. Mervyn Griffith-Jones, and his crony, Mr. Justice
Byrne-got their comeuppance from the jury. Truth crushed
to
