Cremator, The New Statesman; Jul 1, 1971; 82, ProQuest pg. 187 New STATESMAN 6 AUGUST 1971 'Wds to pick up oats for her chickens. 'Let er do ]ler own oatjng,' he would rap out in 1 terrified aside . . . Reflexion fuile, why ."ould not we all do our own oating? I have the press at present a work, which will tartly appear, on the lines of Erery Man l's Own Lawyer, to be entitled Every Man <*'« Own Berenson. ^Osbert Sitwell's 50-page 'short character' .Sickert, introducing the man and his J "lnSs, is not only an integral part of the j °k in the sense that it sets the background the whole, but a magnificent piece of '."g in itself - marvellously funny and !»*"en'' even though 't may piesent a j r rose-coloured picture of its subject, losing by other accounts, I can't help be-0; lng that Sickert was an innately harder in "lart impersonal human being than his ,l,r"e and joie de vivre suggest. Sometime at the turn of the century Max Beerbohm noted nimbly in his Mr Jingle shorthand : Sickert - his charm for all women - Duchess or model - kind, shrewd, then domineering . . . two sides - like Shaw. Cruel mouth -kind eyes. Extreme refinement - love of squalor. This certainly seems to get at the core and chimes with Sickert's grim-gay division of humanity into 'two categories, the invalids and the nurses'. (Remember Denton Welch's inimitable account of how his doctor asked the painter to visit Welch, who was recovering from a serious accident, and how Sickert stormed down the street shouting '1 have no time for district visiting!) Certainly the reader who puts down this book - 'Come again when you can't stop quite so long!' - will agree that he still has time for the experienced magician. ^RTS School for Senility BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE fyrf0ne w'10 d°UDts the aptness of The In "»yr (Mermaid) would do well to ,1 1 UP a letter published in last Satur->'s Times. The signatory was actually a i'y MP called Stokes, but it could well I e been one of William Trevor's charac-H.iS'..sP°uting about their favourite subject. ,c schools, it seems, are desperately eu for the religion, morality, decency, 0[ P'ay, honesty, leadership and strength ^ character they alone properly impress ^ 'heir pupils. And do they divide iltenation? Not at all, declared Stokes, add-^ with odd sense of consistency that 'after l years in personnel time and time again "Sine lessmen when wishing to recruit a new 'a8er will say to me words to this effect, iJJ! me a public school type who gets on everyone and is trusted everywhere".' ^e Proof of the pudding was in the eating. exPlained, and the enemies of this pud- ly Utii Were riding 'a horse which will certain '^n in 1971'. Hi, 0 much for shifty grammar school yobs, e TeO Heath. There's an unappetising pud-for you. If Trevor's people were to 0[C" him in his yachting cap on the front ^orrte resort they'd permit themselves, at itlj5',' a tight, frigid smile each. 'Funny little ^11 > one would say. and 'counterjumper', 5 °'her would agree: and they'd continue to 'll^P the same anecdotes about H. L. Dowse, J? housemaster of the century', they'd been 'trying for the past 40 or 50 years. 0f'V|sive' is inadequate to describe the effect | ,,1eir education. It started by subtracting v" from'society and it went on to deaden ,y ability to do much thereafter but tr„ernber itself. That was the time they won 'OhL: .... . • *'r ability to do much thereafter but infPhies and felt free to thump their °fH?"rs' T,,ey weren'' Just the happiest days Ik "eir lives: they were the only ones. Hence I ^ '•pneern they feel now for the old boys' I |0Ociation, the cord that keeps them attached | J"'1* second, more prehensile womb. |0 h<;re are Sole and Cridley. huddled lather like old maiden hens, and there's ™ej lioyns, who spends his hist years there's Jaraby, k •«> ligsaws. Above Hi, ^ hy his wife while he lectures his ^'isfactory son on the school reports he got a full 25 years ago. His ambition is to be association president, and the play mainly describes how he's thwarted, by a private detective in the pay of Nox, who still broods about the drubbings he received as Jaraby's fag. It is a sad, funny business, conducted in disconcertingly mannered dialogue, as if S/alky anil Co. were pretending to have been written by Jane Austen; and yet quite un-patronising. Trevor handles his upper-crust derelicts with a respectful sympathy, and ends the play by having them sink their differences and make a dramatically implausible but entirely dignified request for the consideration proper to the old and lonely. At this point they speak, and stand, for anyone whose life has been hobbled by mishandling at an age when he was too young to understand or resist. One wouldn't hesitate to recommend it all. were it not for Alan Strachan's production, which is unimaginative and unsubtle, and Michael Redgrave's performance in the leading part. He may, of course, come to remember his lines, which will help; but where I differ from my nicer colleagues is that 1 still can't see the makings of a sound structure behind the scaffolding he offered us on opening night. Jaraby has evidently achieved nothing since school, and his only vaguely fulfilling relationship appears to be with his cat. He is a man who has been crushed, desiccated and left to moulder, like old peel; and yet there's something in the way Sir Michael speaks and moves - a solidity, strength, even resilience - that belies his deaf aid and tentatively perched spectacles. 'Shall Nox who washed the egg stains off my plate dare to answer me back.' he roars, and indeed still might be head of house. Time and disappointment have hardly raddled him: he doesn't begin to resemble the failure he's supposed to have become. He's wrong, and so. consequently, is the play. 'Pork' is a New York chick who shoots drugs, has had two abortions and lovers of both sexes, and is watched throughout the play that bears her name by a man made up to look like our author. Andy Warhol. He sits with a tiny, crooked smile on his dough face, draped down a chair after the 187 manner of Lamb's Lytton Strachey. while Pork reminisces, masturbates with an egg-beater and rolls about a bed with two naked youths, who have faces like Rossetti angels and pubic hair coloured bright turquoise. Other characters appear to talk of this and that, mostly that. A nun's breasts are fondled by a pupil; a Lesbian sets fire to an onanist in a cinema; there's a long discussion about the size of children's testicles, another on varieties of excrement and others on the delights of coprophilia; a pubescent tart trips, squeaks and wriggles: a bald, unsmiling person clad only in black netting drinks absinthe - an androgynous apparition, like the male granny, called Vulva and several others. At first you think you're hearing Isher-wood offer a much more explicit invocation of Sally Bowles's doings in Berlin, and by the end you feel you're sharing Beardsley's madder fantasies; and perhaps that's why the effect is so inoffensive, at times almost endearingly so. 'A real pervert called me!' cries a girl, 'My first!' Her enthusiasm informs the evening. Warhol approaches his scatological erotica as he painted that famous Campbell's soup can. with a sort of callow wonder, untouched by moral bias of any kind. Look, fellatio! Wow! Look, a real live dyke, in a yellow jacket! Isn't that fantastic! Il might indeed be a transatlantic version of that salacious, innocent boy so admired by Wilde - the Yellow Book made Flesh, so to speak. I can't remember an evening in the theatre that struck me as so literally childish. Pork is (naturally) at the Roundhouse; at the Theatre Upstairs, there's Athol Fugard's Boesman and Lena, about two warring Cape coloureds 'resettled', i.e. thrown onto the road. It's a grim, painful, powerful piece of which 1 hope to write more; and the overrated revival of Sham Boat (Adelphi) will also have to wait until a thinner week. FILMS Lascivious Deadpan JONATHAN RABAN More news from the cinema of nastiness. Juraj Herz's brutal gothic comedy The Cremator (Venus. Kentish Town) begins w ith a pile of naked corpses arranged as tastefully as sprays of dog-roses on your bedroom wallpaper; a dream of death as ordered and pure as a line of sentimental verse, or a parade of flaxen-haired Hitler Jugend. The film was made during the last days of the Dubcek regime in 1968, and it's a lip-smacking exploration, or maybe exploitation, of the roots of Nazism in kitsch - in the chintzy, animal-loving, soft-spoken, blue-eyed lower middle class in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. The cremator. Mr Kopfrkingl. is played by Rudolf Hrusinsky wilh an extraordinarily horrible economy of gesture. His spongy, porcine face is topped by a pair of schoolboy NHS spectacles, and when he smiles his lips purse into a squashed square of march-mallow. Combing the hair of a dead girl in an ornate open casket, he absent-mindedly transfers the comb to his own thinning pate. Later, he is combing the hair of his children; the movement is repeated, and we see the dim flicker of a prophetic memory disturbing ess. Copyright© 201 1 ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. Copyright © New Statesman Ltd. 188 his pale eyes behind their thick lenses. 'Do you like Strauss?' he inquires at intervals through the film, in the wheedling voice of a demented sweetshop proprietor. Herz's direction borrows its style from the gruesome obsessions of this wet-eyed monster. The camera gloats over ornament and detail in the same. slow, bovine way as Kopfrkingl. A matchstick twirled inside a waxy ear, the grinding-oul of a cigar butt, the baroque curlicue of a coffin lid. a bathroom tap, the cuts of meat on a butcher's slab, an entomologist's collection of flies in a glass case - these are the primary, visible objects of a society narcissistically devoted to its own products. Food and death are symbolically associated - bread and cremation, as Kopfrkingl remarks, both require ovens - and the film dwells over long munchy family meals. Carp, 'fried on our little furnace', are picked down to bones while the chomping faces of the Kopfrkingls and their Nazi friend themselves take on a !Khy, silent glaze. When the cremator takes his family out for entertainment, it's to a boxing match or a waxwork chamber of horrors. For himself, there's the brothel, and his weekly visit to his doctor for a VD blood test. Since Mrs Kopfrkingl is half-Jewish, she has to be done away with. The cremator lovingly hangs her from their bathroom skylight: '1 think the bathroom is our most attractive room'. His gangling son - played with unblinking reptilian innocence by Milos Vognic - is beaten to death with a crowbar in the crematorium, and Herz hoses the blood from the sanitised marble floor. Meanwhile he feeds and fondles the cat and muses on the sufferings of the troop horses in the Great War. Only occasionally does Herz let up on the lascivious deadpan of the film's basic style, and then it's to reveal Kopfrkingls face as seen through a fish-eye lens - a swollen gargoyle with a vast nose and vestigial ears like fleshy tufts. There's a studied facility about these techniques that brings the film dangerously close to being an example of the same cancerous kitsch it sets out to pillory. Once it was the rise and fall of dynasties that used to afford narratives without benefit of art. Now it's pop concerts. You bug a stadium with cameras, and let it all happen; then the close-cropped wizards of the editing sludio splice together miles of film and mess about with the colour processing. Like so many pop records, the movies that result from this alchemy are a technicians' genre: studio miracles whose artlessness and deceptively verile air have an elaborately cooked-up flavour. Gimme Shelter (Rialto) is the scissored and crocheted version of what went on when the Stones gave their free concert at Altamount. California. But what really happened - freak-ouls. stabbings. deaths, births, hippies mussing up Angels" bikes and Angels mussing hippies in return - was so far away from the clever tricks of the studio that the film breaks up around an unacknowledged incongruity. The cameramen (it took a team of 221 affectionately fill their frames with electronic gear: there are full-length portraits of a beefy entrepreneur's open phone system, of the fans' Vashicas and Rolleis. of mikes and tape recorders and amplifiers and buzzing monitor screens. But technicians only really love their own sorts of technology: interestingly, there's not a single good shot of a customised bike, though the shape of both the film and the event cries out for one. Mick Jagger has the best lines. Looking like a Picasso pierrot under ultra-violet, he croons Copyright© 201 1 ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. Copyright © New Statesman Ltd. petulantly at the rioting crowd: 'Cool out, people, please cool out. We can get it together . . .' A positively Churchillian appeal for unity. Looking in at a replay of the scene in the studio, he clucks at the monitor: 'Oh, that's sad.' It was, too. .Making It (Carlton) doesn't. It attains a lugubrious climax when its hero, a pert 17-year-old, is forced to witness the abortion he's fixed up for his mother. Both of these people are, we're told, in search of self-knowledge, and certainly they're in dire need of that useful commodity. The screenplay has the unhappy air of having once been found witty by someone, and lurches from wry exchanges to revealing incidents like the college edition of The Lucy Show. The standard hand of references, from James Joyce to the I-Ching, is flashed, but takes no tricks. The direction looks as if it was done over a long distance phone, perhaps by the grizzled boss-man of Altamount. It's all as faked and fatty as ex-WD butter-substitute. TELEVISION Vishnuland EDWARD LUCIE-SMITH I looked forward to Yavar Abbas's Ganga Mayya (BBC-2, last Sunday) with unusual curiosity, not merely because it was the work of a distinguished director, but because it was a film about India made by an Indian. True, Abbas has lived in Britain since 1949. Nevertheless, one expected him to have a very different perspective with regard to the sub-continent and her people. Films made by Europeans, such as Louis Malle, have aroused bitter protest in India itself, and the BBC in particular has been accused of showing that which is not to the country's credit - poverty, squalor and corruption. In the event. I expected slightly too much. This was a ravishingly beautiful film, but the direction did not have the finesse of Malle's. Its effects were more academic. Abbas showed us. for example, some footage of Indian ascetics meditating upon the rocks which overlook the Ganges as it passes through the foothills of the Himalayas -and nothing could have been more exotic, or more in the style of the most romantic Indian miniatures. But Malle could do as much with material that was less obvious -I recall one shot of women folding long strips of cloth that had just been dyed, in which the ritual and the ordinary were mysteriously blended. The main disappointment, however, was that the place itself remained as obstinately inaccessible to the mind as in every other glimpse of it. Here were all the expected touches - vultures and jackals devouring the corpses that float in to the bank of the Ganges: a peasant woman squatting on that same bank to give suck to her child: then a noisy fairground and an equally noisy religious procession. Certain emphases, and certain tactful omissions, told us that we were indeed in 1971. There was. for example, a tendency to stress the Muslim community -we caught a glimpse of the most distinguished Indian musician in the sacred citv of Benares, who is a Muslim: we took a slightly more prolonged look at a carpet factory where the workers are by tradition Muslims, and use designs inherited from the Persian court of Shah Abbas. And. while there were NEW STATESMAN 6 AUGUST 19' cripples and beggars enough. Abbas had disposition to make us smell the real si'*' of Indian poverty - instead, we learned " much better off the peasants were no*'1 they mostly owned their own land. , The upshot was that though I wi^L watching the images captured for me by camera, India is remote and alien, ju*' ^ always. I felt precisely the same lacs involvement, looking at Ganga May)"' " j felt when watching all that live coveraE' activity on the moon, though not, fortu- nately,the same degree of boredom. On M<"! day night, as ITN replayed that mistf" little length of footage of the lift off ",„, the moon ("and now in slow motion, the umpteenth time, I came as near as'" ( ever done to smashing the set in Pe,u rage. May we be spared other such sp taculars for a very long time. In fact, it was left to dear, ploddinü ,,iJ ■it" Panorama (BBC-1) to save Monday e* not merely with the confrontation be1" Messrs Wedgwood Benn and Davies-with an excellent, absolutely straightfor*jjjj piece about new methods of dealing young offenders - by using the prol>a u service more intelligently rather '""".jj locking them up. This was strictly meaj two veg.. but it put a point of view fully and convincingly. The idea of ie'eVl1(]jH as a public service is not quite dead *u something like this can be screened at r time. RECORDS Swallowing Words PETER PORTER ir..'1 If any opera were designed to prove words of a libretto are the occasion ot drama and not beautiful poems in theif ^ right, it is Benjamin Britten's The R"^0\t Lucrelia. For years. I have been able to fl" j lines of Ronald Duncan's libretto by n j yet I think it contains some of the ,1*1 11* poetry ever created for the musical lne^ jt It would be churlish to press this. *** jj not that a new generation of enth"5 j (including the commentator in the " ^ accompanying the complete recording^ anxious to rehabilitate Duncan. His c!] j„ we are told, are unused to libret'1 ^ verse. A better way of putting it w'111 )lV» that they are embarrassed by ovc 'c|y. doggerel masquerading as verse. Fortun**j|| if one loves Ihe music one can turn lne ^ Stravinsky-wise, into syllables and s*a it that wav. nl3] But already I've strayed from my A point about libretti. They are only as I J as the music they occasion, and the '"""^[iil Tlie Rape of Lucrelia sounds as be*1 f£-now as it did in 1946, as the new cording proves (SET 492-3, £4.98). ''"'^t is Britten at the height of his invention-^ vitality of the music is remarkable: ij ""..^l all considerations of style, and bisl'1 perspectives of the Boulez sort, merely sl]j5|0 ficial. A short way of pointing to lh|S examine Britten's economy of effect. fc ,t Ri"1 to tell the story of the rape of a K' ^(\f matron by her overlord, and he has. a* ^e or hindrance, two chorus-figures who