2) London

A huge, distorted doll, dressed in an American fatigue uniform, with a grotesquely suggestive bomb-shaped protuberance emerging from below its abdomen, hovers over the proscenium of London’s Aldwych Theater. It is the setting for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s anti-American piéce de résistance for the 1966-67 British theater season—pseudo-documentary about the war in Vietnam entitled US. Below the doll an English actor mimes the fiery suicide of the American pacifist Norman Morrison. Neglecting to mention the fact that Morrison, in his zeal to grab headlines, attempted to drag his child into the flames with him, a pompous narrator declares: “Norman loved people . . . I respect his deed.” “Saigon,” observes a bitter young man, “is the only city in the world where the garbage stands around on the street and they burn people.” A shrill-voiced woman steps forward to tell the audience about Ho Chi Minh: “Uncle Ho’s voice,” she confides, “is warm and gentle and kind. . .” And then the same English actor who mimed Norman Morrison’s final act of fanaticism repeats his performance—only this time as a Buddhist Monk; and all the while an American-style rock ’n’ roll band (us?) is singing, “We’re gonna zap the Cong back to old Haiphong!” With US the Royal Shakespeare Company, once the central pillar of the classical English theater, has succumbed to the vanitas vanitatum of contemporary left-wing theater, capriciously described by Kenneth Tynan of the rival National Theater as the “theater of fact.” While this may be a more euphonic appellation than last year’s “theater of cruelty,” it remains to be seen that it has much to do with the facts—or anything else for that matter. Indeed, a more precise description might be “theater of despair,’ for while US owes much of its force to the theatrical tradition of Erwin Piscator and Rolf Hochhuth, its effect is artless and hip rather than revolutionary, devoid of a genuine sense of protest, hopelessly examining a long list of egregious but irrelevant problems. One cannot imagine Brecht or Mayakovsky dwelling for any length of time on anything quite so sordid and insignificant as Norman Morrison’s suicide. The anti-war motivation behind the play is also a matter of interest. It is all well and good to call upon Aristophanes’ antipathy toward the Pelo- ‘ponnesian War, which the RSC does, but it is quite another thing to journey to the Wroclaw Laboratory Theater in Communist Poland, there. to seek aid in preparing an “objective” account of the American presence in Vietnam; but this is exactly where Peter Brook, the RSC’s director, went for help in preparing US for the London stage. This is not to dispute the fact that the Wroclaw Laboratory Theater and its director, Jerzy Grotowski. have made significant contributions to avant-garde drama, but the _ stridently pro-Viet Cong prejudice of US is enough to convince us that even so distinguished a Polish theater still must adhere to the official dogmas of the Communist Party. Artistically as well as politically the Wroclaw influence is obvious. While it has always been relatively easy to criticize Peter Brook for his occasional lapses into the Susskind-Merrick Weltanschauung, it has never been easy to fault the technical excellence of his RSC productions. But US—with an excess of the “laboratory” approach to theater—is a bad job: tediously experimental, overacted, and often without taste, it is very far from what we have come to expect from the RSC. It was to have been a bold and original example of the courage of the contemporary British theater; a genuine contribution to political awareness. But it has failed to accomplish either of these goals. Instead, it has succeeded only in subjugating the RSC’s own rich artistic heritage to the innovating spirit of the Wroclaw Theater, and in providing us not with a play about politics, but with a play about political slogans. There is nothing new or original about such a play; Meyerhold and Mayakovsky turned out better material by the gross during the early years of the Russian Revolution. As for the play’s supposititious idealism, a banal quotation from Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s cultural commissar, in the pages of the RSC’s newsletter, Flourish, suffices to convince us that it is somehow lacking in sincerity. — Like Viet Rock, its American counterpart, US fails as a protest play. Rather than raising serious objections to the Vietnamese war, the play contents itself with the most hackneyed collection of clichés this side of the Peking Opera: symbols become stereotypes, arguments become slogans, and Vietnam becomes a monumental bore. There is, for example, an incongruous gathering of Green Berets, in which we find every conceivable American political persuasion — including that of SNCC. We are calmly listening to a strangely docile member of the Special Forces as he expostulates on the evils of war when a hulking Marine officer strides forward and solemnly declares himself to be a hawk. The hip London audience, which was perfectly willing to aecept the possibility of a Vietnik in the Special Forces, spasmodically breaks into laughter at this point; they know that only a comically stupid man could support the Vietnamese war. Anyway, it is “in” to laugh at hawks these days, and London audiences are nothing if they are not “in.” At the end the entire cast assembles for one last cryptic message. A young actor, dressed in the latest mod costume, ritualistically proceeds to release live butterflies into the audience, ~ which is tingling with its own righteousness. But he keeps the last butterfly and ignites it with his cigarette lighter. It burns—like Norman Morrison. And the actors just stand there, waiting for the audience to get the point—that the play is done—and go home. It is in this last moment of indecision, when the audience is searching for a conclusion, that US hopes to make one last, inexorable esoteric point about. Vietnam. But since the RSC has nothing at all to say about Vietnam, one finds oneself wondering, with Kenneth Tynan (of all people), “Are we keeping you or are you keeping us waiting?” It is they who have kept us waiting —waiting for a play that says something about Vietnam. But, despite the high-flown rhetoric, and all the talk about the “theater of fact,” and the Wroclaw Laboratory Theater, US offers nothing new to the continuing debate about the Vietnam war. Swinging London, not Vietnam, is the play’s theme, and if it has anything to say it is about Carnaby Street rather than Saigon.

PW

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Peter P. Witonski

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A huge, distorted doll, dressed in an American fatigue uniform, with a grotesquely suggestive bomb-shaped protuberance emerging from below its abdomen, hovers over the proscenium of London’s Aldwych Theater. It is the setting for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s anti-American piéce de résistance for the 1966-67 British theater season—pseudo-documentary about the war in Vietnam entitled US. Below the doll an English actor mimes the fiery suicide of the American pacifist Norman Morrison. Neglecting to mention the fact that Morrison, in his zeal to grab headlines, attempted to drag his child into the flames with him, a pompous narrator declares: “Norman loved people . . . I respect his deed.” “Saigon,” observes a bitter young man, “is the only city in the world where the garbage stands around on the street and they burn people.” A shrill-voiced woman steps forward to tell the audience about Ho Chi Minh: “Uncle Ho’s voice,” she confides, “is warm and gentle and kind. . .” And then the same English actor who mimed Norman Morrison’s final act of fanaticism repeats his performance—only this time as a Buddhist Monk; and all the while an American-style rock ’n’ roll band (us?) is singing, “We’re gonna zap the Cong back to old Haiphong!” With US the Royal Shakespeare Company, once the central pillar of the classical English theater, has succumbed to the vanitas vanitatum of contemporary left-wing theater, capriciously described by Kenneth Tynan of the rival National Theater as the “theater of fact.” While this may be a more euphonic appellation than last year’s “theater of cruelty,” it remains to be seen that it has much to do with the facts—or anything else for that matter. Indeed, a more precise description might be “theater of despair,’ for while US owes much of its force to the theatrical tradition of Erwin Piscator and Rolf Hochhuth, its effect is artless and hip rather than revolutionary, devoid of a genuine sense of protest, hopelessly examining a long list of egregious but irrelevant problems. One cannot imagine Brecht or Mayakovsky dwelling for any length of time on anything quite so sordid and insignificant as Norman Morrison’s suicide. The anti-war motivation behind the play is also a matter of interest. It is all well and good to call upon Aristophanes’ antipathy toward the Pelo- ‘ponnesian War, which the RSC does, but it is quite another thing to journey to the Wroclaw Laboratory Theater in Communist Poland, there. to seek aid in preparing an “objective” account of the American presence in Vietnam; but this is exactly where Peter Brook, the RSC’s director, went for help in preparing US for the London stage. This is not to dispute the fact that the Wroclaw Laboratory Theater and its director, Jerzy Grotowski. have made significant contributions to avant-garde drama, but the _ stridently pro-Viet Cong prejudice of US is enough to convince us that even so distinguished a Polish theater still must adhere to the official dogmas of the Communist Party. Artistically as well as politically the Wroclaw influence is obvious. While it has always been relatively easy to criticize Peter Brook for his occasional lapses into the Susskind-Merrick Weltanschauung, it has never been easy to fault the technical excellence of his RSC productions. But US—with an excess of the “laboratory” approach to theater—is a bad job: tediously experimental, overacted, and often without taste, it is very far from what we have come to expect from the RSC. It was to have been a bold and original example of the courage of the contemporary British theater; a genuine contribution to political awareness. But it has failed to accomplish either of these goals. Instead, it has succeeded only in subjugating the RSC’s own rich artistic heritage to the innovating spirit of the Wroclaw Theater, and in providing us not with a play about politics, but with a play about political slogans. There is nothing new or original about such a play; Meyerhold and Mayakovsky turned out better material by the gross during the early years of the Russian Revolution. As for the play’s supposititious idealism, a banal quotation from Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s cultural commissar, in the pages of the RSC’s newsletter, Flourish, suffices to convince us that it is somehow lacking in sincerity. — Like Viet Rock, its American counterpart, US fails as a protest play. Rather than raising serious objections to the Vietnamese war, the play contents itself with the most hackneyed collection of clichés this side of the Peking Opera: symbols become stereotypes, arguments become slogans, and Vietnam becomes a monumental bore. There is, for example, an incongruous gathering of Green Berets, in which we find every conceivable American political persuasion — including that of SNCC. We are calmly listening to a strangely docile member of the Special Forces as he expostulates on the evils of war when a hulking Marine officer strides forward and solemnly declares himself to be a hawk. The hip London audience, which was perfectly willing to aecept the possibility of a Vietnik in the Special Forces, spasmodically breaks into laughter at this point; they know that only a comically stupid man could support the Vietnamese war. Anyway, it is “in” to laugh at hawks these days, and London audiences are nothing if they are not “in.” At the end the entire cast assembles for one last cryptic message. A young actor, dressed in the latest mod costume, ritualistically proceeds to release live butterflies into the audience, ~ which is tingling with its own righteousness. But he keeps the last butterfly and ignites it with his cigarette lighter. It burns—like Norman Morrison. And the actors just stand there, waiting for the audience to get the point—that the play is done—and go home. It is in this last moment of indecision, when the audience is searching for a conclusion, that US hopes to make one last, inexorable esoteric point about. Vietnam. But since the RSC has nothing at all to say about Vietnam, one finds oneself wondering, with Kenneth Tynan (of all people), “Are we keeping you or are you keeping us waiting?” It is they who have kept us waiting —waiting for a play that says something about Vietnam. But, despite the high-flown rhetoric, and all the talk about the “theater of fact,” and the Wroclaw Laboratory Theater, US offers nothing new to the continuing debate about the Vietnam war. Swinging London, not Vietnam, is the play’s theme, and if it has anything to say it is about Carnaby Street rather than Saigon.