Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

About three years ago in New York it was possible to go to the theatre every night for almost a month and either be passably entertained or at least be able to add a collector’s piece or a reputably performed classic. One remembers Zero Mostel in Ulysses in Nightown, Tennessee Williams’s Garden District, Anthony Perkins in Look Homeward Angel, Eva Gabor in Wedekind’s Lulu and many others. Now there is, at least for the visiting Englishman, a sad air of déjà vu about the whole thing. (The same is presumably true of London for the American visitor and one will probably have to resign oneself to this as long as managements prefer anything with a transatlantic accent to a play by a new author. It was something of a relief not to find The Mousetrap making its nightly catch on Broadway.)

     The big hits on Broadway are Paul Scofield in A Man for All Seasons, which sported a quarter-page advertisement in the New York Times headed ‘7 critics — 7 raves’; The Complaisant Lover with Michael Redgrave, Googie Withers and Richard Johnson; Elizabeth Seal is Irma La Douce once more and the hit of the season, as any New York intellectual worth his neurosis will tell you, is The Caretaker with Donald Pleasance as the tramp. Apart from these there are some truly deplorable musicals which shock one, not because of their badness but because their audiences appear to love them. (Is this, one wonders, because it is difficult to hate something that one has paid about three pounds a head to see?) There are also, it must be added, several very worthy off-Broadway productions, including a notable Ghosts and a rare O’Neill, Diff’rent, and New York must be the only city outside Paris to have two long-running Genet plays. There is also Fredric March in Tyrone Guthrie’s production of Paddy Chayevsky’s latest work Gideon. This piece prompted one critic to exclaim, ‘All hail, Mahomet, prophet of the middlebrow!’

     What then is there to write about? The answer lies in two wildly disparate works: Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana and Jack Gelber’s The Apple. There are rumours that Iguana is to be Mr Williams’ last work for the Broadway theatre. He himself has been reported as saying that he could not stand the financial pressure of the absurdly inflationary costs of Broadway and expressing an understandable preference for the greater sanity of off-Broadway. Certainly he has little reason to love the New York critics, many of whom responded this time with remarks like ‘In a sentence, I was bored’ and ‘In our opinion this pilgrim’s progress by neurotics and failures is not off his top shelf,’ and one critic referred to ‘artistic sadism’. Others gave it qualified and grudging praise but only John Chapman wholly approved.

     In fact the play is vintage Williams and if one likes his work one cannot but admire this one. It is an expanded version of a one-act play originally written for the Spoleto festival of 1959 and is set in a sleazy Mexican boarding house in 1940 — there are several crudely caricatured Nazis around. The principal guests are a defrocked priest who was locked out of his church for an interesting combination of blasphemy and fornication; he had a habit of referring to God as a senile delinquent and, rather like Elmer Gantry, seducing nubile Sunday school teachers while attempting to solve their problems in prayer, a virginal forty-year-old spinster and her ninety - eight - year - old grandfather, ‘America’s oldest practising poet’. The old man earns a few dollars by reciting to the guests at whatever hotel they are staying in, and the woman by doing lightning sketches of tourists. The priest, losing his job as a guide because he cannot leave the sixteen-year-olds alone, is kept by the owner of the boarding house, played by Bette Davis with the aid of much décolletage, many predatory snorts and precious little acting. By the end of the play the poet, Alan Webb, has found the elusive quatrain with which to end his lyric; the priest, Patrick O’Neal, has symbolically set free the iguana, the lizard being fattened for madam’s supper, and the girl has described the sum total of her sexual experience. This consists of a knee-patting advance in a cinema and a midnight boat-trip with a middle-aged fetichist who satisfies himself, in her presence, with the aid of her underwear. For good measure there are thrown in descriptions of starving Mexicans eating excrement. The two men and Margaret Leighton as the spinster are, at times, heartbreaking in a play which is easy to dismiss as the mixture as before. But if this is a formula play then it is one in which Williams for once states the formula explicitly. ‘Nothing human disgusts me,’ says the spinster. And there, surely, is the whole of Williams’s philosophy. With the exception of The Rose Tattoo there is a solid oeuvre devoted to a desperate analysis of frustrated desire, stunted, loveless sex and emotional paralysis.

     In Night of the Iguana we are aware once again of the supreme craftsmanship. But we are also aware of the peculiar, rather tortured compassion which is his own particular cross. In an interview, Williams described the play’s Nazis as corresponding to Stanley Kowalski and ‘instead of one Blanche DuBois I have three in “Iguana”, but with the mutations in the Blanche-archetype that correspond to the length of time that’s passed since I conceived of our world and time as a place of mortal combat between the Blanches and the Stanleys’. At the end of the play, according to their creator, his characters are ‘learning to reach the point of utter despair and still go past it with courage’. They have in fact made their gesture before sinking into the trough once more. It is rather as if Madame Ranevsky had actually tried to build those summer cottages. Indeed, one cannot help feeling that in The Night of the Iguana Williams has reached his zenith as a Southern Chekhov very liberally laced with Krafft-Ebing. It is a much more human play than most of its predecessors because his characters are not being merely observed with a kind of avuncular, almost worldly, tolerance but are being forgiven because they know what they do and what is being done to them and ‘go past it with courage’. Strangely, it is — if one may use the phrase without infringing copyright — a Christian play.

     Mr Gelber’s play is absolutely of the sixties. It is cool. It is far out. It perplexed the critics, over-wary because they boobed over The Connection, to such an extent that Walter Kerr wrote: ‘I am a failure. I cannot hate The Apple.’ Which must be an admission of something. The play is set in a coffee bar, so the audience become customers and are fed coffee or cider in the intervals. The characters are known by their actors’ names. They consist of a genial Negro, an action painter, his girl-friend, a homosexual, a whore and a paranoid racist. The painter paints a picture on stage and auctions it during the second interval. A tailor’s dummy of indeterminate sex figures largely in the action. Various characters act out their fantasies on stage. For example, the painter becomes a doctor operating in the jungle and is interrupted when the Negro comes on, dressed as a witch-doctor and pushing a wheelbarrow containing a copulating couple, with the words: ‘Doctor, you gotta do something. Two of my villagers is stuck.’ People die and are resuscitated. The apple is produced from someone’s mouth and is ceremoniously bitten from by all. There is also one other character, a spastic, who at the end reveals that he is the only one who has actually been acting by talking normally and leaving his name and telephone number for the benefit of any agents and producers in the house.

     Absolutely of the sixties? Or is it a throwback to the days of the German Expressionist plays or works like Picasso’s Desire Caught by the Tail? There is a lot to be said against The Apple. It is self-consciously épatant. It reads badly and in performance it was impossible to tell where text ended and producer began. Yet, in effect, these two faults triumphantly constitute its virtues. The production, obviously a careful and loving co-operation between author and director, is genuinely exciting and beneath their joint shock tactics there are several accurate blows at current moods and attitudes. While The Connection was a combination of documentary and verismo, The Apple represents several steps forward. It is at once denied the convenience of the Aristotelian unities and the consequent automatic focusing of the audience’s attention and is thus forced to strike out in several independent directions at once. The junkies were all, as it were, automatically shocking because they were junkies. In The Apple the characters have to work to get under the skin and certainly as the first night an am parently hardened audience of critics and smart intellectuals could be heard to gasp occasionally at what it considered to be verbal and visual indecencies. But this play is much more than merely épatant because it takes liberties with the language and with cosily pre-conceived ideas. It is a play which should be done here but which, like Gelber’s other play, must be produced in a tiny unorthodox theatre. Otherwise the proscenium will kill it as it killed The Connection at the Duke of York’s. Gelber’s dramatic power consists chiefly in his direct, almost uncomfortable contact with his audience, and in his ability to reach a living audience, at least, he is an important dramatist.