N.F. Simpson has not had a new play produced on a British stage for 30 years. After sitting through this one, I can see why.
I'm sorry to have to write this. I bought my ticket for the Saturday matinee (£14 concession) at the Jermyn Street theatre hoping to be able to write about Mr Simpson (who is 91) striking a blow for the over-60s against the cult of yoof and triumphing over years of exclusion and unjustified neglect. The author was in the audience and took a bow at the end, amid enthusiastic applause from an audience not in the first flush of youth. But it all struck me as rather sad.
For those who weren't around at the time, N.F. Simpson was part of the absurdist comedy school of the late 1950s and 1960s, with plays such as One Way Pendulum, first produced at the Royal Court in 1959 under the direction of Bill Gaskill. I still have a well-thumbed early Faber copy of the play (price six shillings) on my bookshelf, which reveals that the lead role of Kirby Groomkirby was played by a young actor named Roddy Maude-Roxby. More than half a century later, the same Roddy Maude-Roxby gives a nice deadpan performance as Geoffrey Wythenshaw, an elderly writer dictating his memoirs and contemplating the prospect of death amid frequent interruptions. He's backed up by seven other talented actors, including Paul Copley, but their combined efforts are not enough to rescue the play, which is directed at a leaden pace by Simon Usher.
N.F. Simpson's work featured in a mixed bill at the Donmar three years ago under the title Absurdia. My verdict in 2007 hasn't softened as a result of his new play; it confirms my view that his talent is suited better to radio than any other medium. If So, Then Yes unfortunately lacks even the basic ingredients of good drama. It's title recalls Pirandello, but it is about as theatrical as a wet sock. The actors talk at each other, wander on and off the stage exchanging speeches, but there is no dramatic action of any kind. Of course, absurdism in the 1950s marked a long overdue and very healthy subversion of the traditional well-made realistic play based on character and plot. Absurdist writing influenced Joe Orton, Peter Cook, Tom Stoppard and the Pythons. But Stoppard moved on from his early fascination with verbal pyrotechnics to create real characters with real emotions. Though plotting has never been one of his strongpoints, his plays have a powerful underlying structure, which boils down to having a beginning, a middle and an end. The same can be said for Joe Orton, though his career was cut short. N.F. Simpson, by comparison, hasn't evolved at all. The scenes in this play could be staged in any order.
Whereas his early play A Resounding Tinkle featured a couple taking delivery of an unseen elephant, this one has a young woman who wants to turn herself into a walrus, and who talks about using binoculars to tell right from wrong. There's a chorus of two cleaning ladies, a joke about Basingstoke and a man whose speciality is analysing the muddiness of historic battlefields. The play ends with a lecture about belief and rationality, which appears to be entirely serious. Some of the short scenes appear to have been written purely for the sake of one verbal gag, including a discussion about Sartre's failure to win the Nobel Prize for literature because of his false teeth. All the characters speak with much the same voice and tell the same kind of jokes. There's a mention of a mosquito. Does he carry malaria? one character inquires. If asked, comes the reply. This isn't totally unfunny -- it might make a good if old-fashioned Punch cartoon -- but it has nothing much to do with theatre. At best, the result is a collection of disjointed sketches around the theme of meeting one's maker. But it isn't a play. I felt my £14 could have been better spent elsewhere. British theatre has moved on quite a bit in the last 40 years, and absurdist comedy is now so much part of the cultural mainstream that it is no longer labelled as such . I'm the last person to argue in favour of cutting edge modernity or keeping up with theatrical fashion, and I firmly believe a good play is a good play whether it's written in the style of 2010 or 1960. The essential problem isn't so much that N.F. Simpson's writing is dated, but rather that verbal paradoxes which look good on the page aren't enough to create theatre -- something that demands to be watched rather than just listened to.
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