96
SUSAN SONTAG
peculiarly ghoulish transaction between a bad play and a bad audience.
One such exemplary instance is John Osborne's
Luther,
directed by Tony
Richardson and starring the rugged Albert Finney as the Great Spir–
itual Reformer. Osborne's play is unremittingly vulgar and slapdash
in its ideas and its writing. Rumor has it that it was only a few weeks
in the writing after Osborne read a couple of psychoanalytic studies of
Luther's anality, Erik Erikson's
Young Man Luther
and Norman Brown's
Life Against Death.
Be that as it may, the reaction of the audience is
worthy of Osborne's play. The key moment is the fit which the young
Luther has in the first act-presumably an excruciating stomach-ache,
but looking more like epilepsy. There is a great deal of groaning, doubling
over, retching, and belly-clutching, which climaxes impressively with
Finney falling straight on his back from a standing position. In most
performances, at the conclusion of this fit, the audience applauds-as
they do after a strenuous
coloratura
aria or a lengthy
entrechat-and
the
play has to stop. Though I have always felt that anyone who applauds
during a performance (be it an opera, a ballet, or a play) should be
promptly expelled from the theater for disorderly conduct, I have to
admit that the audience's reaction to Finney's tour de force is, in a
way, perfectly just.
Luther,
to its credit handsome as a picture-book
(excellent lighting, bare effective sets), is phony, absolutely phony to
the core. Not one of a hundred of the people who attend this play
could possibly have the slightest interest in Luther and his real problems.
What draws them is the solemn, edifying staging and the gimmick of
Luther's constipation.
Luther
only pretends to be about Luther; it
is really about physicalness, which is why Finney is applauded for having
beautiful convulsions. The power of Finney's over-rated performance
lies in what made it right for him to play the sexy proletarian lout in
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
and that wonderful piece of 18th
century beefcake,
Tom Jones.
Add to Finney's manifest virility the
trappings of neurosis and an ungainly psychosomatic disorder, and you
have a supreme instance of the modern theater audience's craving to
level down. The Great Spiritual Reformer turns out to be the Great
Neurotic. Let us discover neurosis behind the spiritual, as we have
discovered the spiritual in ugliness and neurosis. Amen. The Broadway
audience loves nothing better than a cut-rate job of debunking, preferably
masking as psychoanalytic
gemutlichkeit.
In
Luther,
it can get a quick
educational TV-type briefing on A Great Moment in Western History:
the Reformation. "My son, don't you see what could happen out of all
this? ... A time will come when a man will no longer be able to say,
'I speak Latin and am a Christian' and go his way in peace." At the