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Theater as Supermarket
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19805 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1991 |
2,052 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
British director Peter Brook once told me in conversation that theater fuels a need like food, or sex. It would be unkind to compare the British theater to a brothel, so I will take the other alternative. If one imagines the British theater as a kind of supermarket, the work of Christopher Hampton has a section to itself, next to the TV dinner display. The quality is consistently middlebrow; that is to say, nicely packaged, easily swallowed, well-done of its kind, not too highly flavored, and having a pretty good shelf life. It is also bought by large numbers of people who have little time for shopping around. The dominant characteristic is a pervasive smoothness rather like Campbell's cream of mushroom soup.
These qualities have been present in Hampton's work since his first success, which I saw some years ago at the Royal Court in London. (Curiously, he no longer lists it among his program credits.) This was a piquant little play, When Did You Last See My Mother?, about a student who has an affair with his friend's mother. It was the perfect example of a certain genre popular on Broadway in the thirties and forties: daring enough to titillate the old ladies in the audience but not sufficiently raw to offend them.
Safeway Gourmet
Les Liaisons Dangereuses was a similar sort of hit both onstage and in films; though it did not catch the quality of the original French book [see Richard Grenier's review in THE WORLD & I, September 1987] it did succeed as a kind of Safeway gourmet product. He has also produced English versions of Ibsen, Isaak Babel, Moliere, and the somewhat charogne-flavored Viennese playwright Odon von Horvath.
Having accumulated a good store of commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic, plus satisfactory exposure in films and on television, Hampton has arrived at the stage in his career when he himself might be regarded by audiences as interesting--at least as interesting as his work. This does not happen to every successful writer, but it has happened to some of them, and the consequence has always been the same: autobiography in one form or another. I can report that Hampton--never much of an innovator--has observed this rule scrupulously. He has put together a dramaturgical memoir of his childhood in Alexandria, Egypt. It is called The White Chameleon and was first staged in the National's studio theater, the Cottesloe. Hampton also observes the other rule about this genre, which is to pretend that it is not really (or wholly, anyhow) autobiographical. The play is disingenuously prefaced in the
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