Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture

		31 Oct. - 6 Nov. 2002 Issue No. 610 Culture	Current issue Previous issue Site map
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875		Recommend this page

Plain Talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din

I am a great fan of reviews, especially theatre reviews. A good review is to me as valid a piece of creative writing as any part of a play. This is why when reading any newspaper or magazine I first turn to the Arts section. Loving theatre reviews does not, however, mean that I ignore or neglect reviews of books or films.
Such special feelings are probably a result of my love of the theatre. And my love for the theatre grew from watching and enjoying some of the best plays ever written.
I had the immense good fortune of living through what, in my opinion, can be rightly called the golden age of theatre. That was the period immediately following World War II when London became, again, the Mecca of theatre.
I arrived in London in 1945 as a young official and left it in 1956 as a diplomat. So I was lucky to enjoy a period of 12 years of theatre-going, at a time when a series of excellent plays were being performed on the London stage by writers such as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Anton Chekov, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, as well as such writers of poetic drama like T S Eliot and Christopher Fry.
It was a joy watching Vivien Leigh playing Blanche Du Bois in Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, and Edward G Robinson in Miller's Death of a Salesman. There were also Ibsen's A Doll's House and Chekov's Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard. Apart from the plays and their wonderful actors and actresses, there were the accompanying reviews by such theatre critics as Ivor Brown and Norman Marshall.
What brought back these memories is a wonderful literary piece in the form of a review of A Streetcar Named Desire, playing at the National Theatre, by John Peter. It is not simply a critique of the performance and the mastery of the artists, it is an analysis of Williams' play. Blanche is played by Glenn Close, a name associated more with the screen than the stage. Peter has this to say about her: "The moment she appears, you know that she is one of the lost ones. Close moves tentatively yet purposefully, she knows that Blanche is both a fugitive and an aggressor."
He further writes: "She suffers from a combination of insecurity and raw pride and, like all such people, she is completely self- centred. She might have stepped out of one of Dostoevsky's novels: her insecurity fuels her pride, and her pride exonerates her insecurity." To me this reads like an essay of criticism and not simply a review.
Going through this review furnishes the reader with fresh ideas about several concepts. John Peter puts the play in the category of tragedies. Both this play and Miller's Death of a Salesman are described as two of the greatest American tragedies. Tragedies, John Peter says, "are warnings that all may not be well."
The reason Streetcar is a tragedy, he goes on to say, is not because Blanche is a tragic figure: you cannot be a tragic figure on your own. "Tragedy occurs when some catastrophic force in the order of things finds a suitable victim." Blanche Du Bois was such a victim.
It is very rare that one comes across a reviewer who is so enthusiastic about an artist as to write: "This is a great, subtle performance, thrillingly theatrical but unostentatious, and as powerful, intelligent and moving as anything I have ever seen on this stage."
On another page there is a review of Chekov's Uncle Vanya, while the BBC is organising the Arena Pinter season, during which his plays will be presented on a nightly basis. The season began on 26 October and continues until 9 November. This goes to show, first, the importance of having a "repertoire" for the theatre, and secondly, that good plays never die.

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