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Matrimony, Racism, and British Theater
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18513 |
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THE ARTS
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4 / 1991 |
2,101 Words |
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
The late George Jean Nathan once described marriage, briefly, as finding a brand of beer you like, and then going to work in the brewery. The Swedish cineaste, director, and writer Ingmar Bergman took longer, much longer. He put his own feelings about the institution into several installments of a television series, Scenes from a Marriage, which starred Liv Ullmann and was later made into a film, and then into a stage play--all, as they say, of the same name.
Like a Sauna
The play arrived in London, appropriately, in midwinter, staged at Wyndham's Theatre in a curious box set much like the inside of a sauna, with benches and stove removed: unadorned, dun-colored strip pine walls and a board floor. Now and again a large bed is brought in and moved about by stage-hands, looking very solemn in chaste gray trousers and black long-sleeved tops. There is also a bit of minimal office furniture and a telephone, shifted in the same manner. And on the bed there is a large duvet.
For two and a half hours Johan, played by Alan Howard, and Marianne, played by the antipodean actress Penny Downie, clamber fully clothed in and out of the bed, stalk about the other furniture, and threaten to use the telephone. They play out a grim and stultifying theatrical portrait of two marital losers who can neither relate to each other in any positive way nor get rid of each other, probably because both are quite passive; the exceptions that prove this rule are sporadic gestures of rebellion against their situation or each other, carrying little conviction, and never for one instant reducing their parasitic mutual dependence. They bicker, whine, bitch, make emotional demands that are invariably refused, copulate once, shower themselves and each other in self-pity, refer to offstage children in whom it is impossible to believe for a moment, and--after agreeing to have another child--terminate a pregnancy. Johan, not at all surprisingly, fails to get a fellowship at an American university. Some time in the second of two acts they manage to go through a sort of de jure divorce, but end the play together on the floor under that duvet "in the middle of the night in a dark house somewhere in the world."
This piece was first staged in Britain outside of London at the Festival Theatre in Chichester, which has a thrust stage with the audience sitting on three sides. London critics insisted that Bergman's play worked well in that setting. On the proscenium stage at Wyndhams they did not like it and neither did I. Alan Howard, who is one of the best leading men in Britain,
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