[Curiosities] Michael Billington: profiles of decades of reviews

[LosT贼]

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. Michael Billington’s first Guardian review, on 2 October 1971 FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘As exciting as a vicarage parlour game’ … Michael Billington’s first Guardian review, on 2 October 1971. Photograph: Richard Nelsson/The Guardian Not I Advertisement 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. Ken Dodd opens his one-man show, Ha Ha, at the Playhouse in Liverpool in 1973. FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘King-sized Dodd-fest’ … Ken Dodd opens his one-man show, Ha Ha, at the Playhouse in Liverpool in 1973. Photograph: Mirrorpix/Getty Images 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 Advertisement 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.