Durbridge Play

Fortune theatre, London, 2 October 1971

The conventional stage whodunit is about as exciting as a vicarage
parlour game. But the great virtue of this slick, highly polished thriller
by Francis Durbridge is that almost from the start we know who is
going to murder whom: the dramatic excitement, as in Dial M for
Murder, lies in watching the net slowly close in on the smug, smooth
protagonist.
Company
Her Majesty’s theatre, London, 19 January 1972
How good is Company? When I saw Stephen Sondheim’s musical 18
months ago in New York, I thought it a marvellously tart, wry, original
show that got away from all the lumbering cliches of the
formula-bound Broadway musical. Second time round I admire it
even more; partly because its surface exuberance seems to conceal a
great sadness, partly because it has the whiplash precision of the best
Broadway shows plus a good deal of intellectual resonance.

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‘As exciting as a vicarage parlour game’ … Michael Billington’s first
Guardian review, on 2 October 1971. Photograph: Richard
Nelsson/The Guardian
Not I
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Royal Court, London, 17 January 1973
If Beckett has a painter’s eye, he also has a poet’s ear. The mouth
belongs to a 70-year-old woman whose past life flashes before her,
like that of someone drowning, but who transfers her experiences to
someone else: the impression is of a buzzing skull, a mouth on fire
helplessly attached to a body incapable of feeling. If I had to sum up
the play’s theme in a phrase, it would be the anguish of memory at a
time when all physical sentience had departed. Billie Whitelaw’s
performance is an astonishing tour de force combining frenetic verbal
speed with total sensitivity to the musical rhythm of the piece.
Ken Dodd
Liverpool Playhouse, 17 April 1973
Ostensibly, the intention is to explore the nature of laughter: in reality
what we get is a king-sized Dodd-fest. It begins with those wayward
teeth spotlit in what looks like a conscious parody of Billie Whitelaw
in Beckett; and it goes on to run the gamut of Doddy jokes. Wisely,
perhaps, Dodd avoids too much theorising. He quotes Freud’s
opinions that a laugh is a conservation of psychic energy; but, as he
says, the trouble with Freud is that he never played Glasgow second
house on a Friday night.

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‘King-sized Dodd-fest’ … Ken Dodd opens his one-man show, Ha Ha,
at the Playhouse in Liverpool in 1973. Photograph: Mirrorpix/Getty
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Brassneck
Nottingham Playhouse, 21 September 1973
Brassneck by Howard Brenton and David Hare is an important play.
Not since John Arden’s The Workhouse Donkey 10 years ago have I
seen any work that attempts to put a whole regional community on
stage and show in detail how the provincial power nexus works.
Judging by the outraged huffing and puffing near me, it was
courageous of Nottingham Playhouse to stage it.
Words of Advice
Greenwich theatre, London, 5 March 1974
Fay Weldon’s play is tight, tart and alert. In the centre of the ring are
Tammy and Julia, a primary schoolteacher and his suffocating wife,
who use each other like punchbags. Encircling them are their parents
and in-laws who prefer contradictory, self-interesting advice. My
gripe about the play is that its horizons are inevitably limited. It
scarcely touches on the high cost of loving, on the way social inequity
affects private relationships and on the crucial fact that even our
emotional crises are carried on against the background of changing
public events: only in plays do people have time to suffer in a vacuum.
But Miss Weldon can certainly write.
The Tempest
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Old Vic, London, 7 March 1974
Fourteen years ago precisely, Peter Hall began his brilliant Stratford
reign with an over-decorated, eccentrically cast production of Two
Gentlemen of Verona. We should not, therefore, despair if he has
begun his National Theatre career with a lethargic, vulgarly
spectacular, masque-like production of The Tempest that almost
manages to submerge the presence of the greatest living
Shakespearean actor, Sir John Gielgud, in opulent excess.
Bordello
Queen’s theatre, London, 19 April 1974
I have, I suppose, seen worse musicals than Bordello. Indeed I can
wincingly remember one about refrigerated corpses and another
about premature ejaculation at a certain north London engine shed.
But it’s a long time since I’ve seen a show of such extravagant
pointlessness or one that deployed such elaborate resources to convey
a message that could be comfortably inscribed on the back of a 3½d
stamp.
Travesties
Aldwych, London, 11 June 1974
I find it difficult to write in calm, measured tones about Tom
Stoppard’s Travesties: a dazzling pyrotechnical feat that combines
Wildean pastiche, political history, artistic debate,
spoof-reminiscence and song-and-dance in marvellously judicious
proportions. The text itself is a dense Joycean web of literary allusions;
yet it also radiates sheer intellectual joie de vivre, as if Stoppard were
delightedly communicating the fruits of his own researches.

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Dazzling … Robert Powell in costume for his role as dadaist Tristan
Tzara in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties. Photograph: Ian Tyas/Getty
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Play Mas
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Royal Court, London, 17 July 1974
Mustapha Matura’s Play Mas is an endearing, intelligent comedy. I
only hope the work, playing at heavily