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 t h e a t r e

BOOK REVIEW

Independent, 11.ix.94

In a book strangely short of theatrical anecdote there is nevertheless one which I shall treasure. [Arnold] Wesker tells how he wanted to re-create a moment of passion from his youth in his play "The Four Seasons."

When he was a teenager, a girlfriend undid her blouse, bade him close his eyes and pressed her breasts against him. Wesker put this scene in his 1965 play. But, even in the midst of the permissive society, Diane Cilento refused to bare her breasts either to the audience or to Alan Bates on stage with her.

Instead, with her back to the auditorium, she faced Bates with her nipples criss-crossed with Elastoplast. By the end of the run Bates and Cilento weren't talking to each other.

"It was the first of my plays,'' writes Wesker mournfully, "which appeared on stage not as I conceived it.''

Methuen Modern Theatre Profiles, ©1983
ISBN 0-413-49240-0

The critical reception of Wesker's next play, The Four Seasons, was so hostile that Wesker was amazed -- "The critics went berserk! " -- but added that "Even for the most intelligent and sane critic, it still is a shock to go expecting one kind of play and to receive another". Different it certainly was. Earlier Wesker had announced that it was to be "a love story about two people", and in spite of the mockery of some columnists -- "Oh, one of those love stories! How square can you get?" -- this is exactly what it was. In four episodes corresponding to the four seasons, the protagonists Adam and Beatrice appear in a deserted house; in winter Adam tries to thaw her speechless misery, in spring they fall in love, insummer quarrels reminiscent of old quarrels begin, and in autumn they part -- all this without any explanation, background or other influences.
These obvious differences from his earlier plays prompted several people to an assessment of Wesker's new position. The Jewish Chronicle, thinking of The Kitchen, pointed out "He has dabbled in the abstract before". Others thought the play manifested features that were new but unsuccessful, while applauding the experiment for its own sake. Philip Hope-Wallace dismissed the piece as 'pretentious and utterly ineffective as a piece of drama" but added "I respect Mr Wesker for the sincerity and for having the courage to try it at all"; encouragement echoed by the Times critic -- "One admirable hall-mark of the younger dramatists is their willingness to go on experimenting with new forms". But again, he didn't like the results of the retreat from naturalism:

Though Mr Wesker is constantly alert to the explosive undertow present in any intimate relationship, perceptiveness does not of itself constitute drama. The flaw in his play is that he totally excludes the outside world. He does not admit that a love affair is no less subjective to economic and social pressures than anything else.

In a long and sensitive review Mervyn Jones also offered

a salute to his courage ... because the trend of contemporary criticism is to mark out each writer's proper territory and rebuke him if he dares to break out of it .... the play is at its best when attention is concentrated on the man and the woman, on what is happening within and between them. The external aids in terms of activity -- painting walls and making cakes -- are a weakening concession. With these devices, Wesker does what he knows he can do easily and what does not belong in this play.

Jones wondered whether the "vacuum" impression worried people because it had not been carried out thoroughly enough; the initial abstraction was undermined by the isolated mention of shops and lectures -- "either we don't need this framework, or we need more of it".
Abstraction was the message of the set in this production, though in a later adaptation for television, Wesker based the set naturalistically on his own Welsh cottage. Zbynek Kolar, whose work Wesker had admired before asking him to design the set, built two flats as walls, with other furniture sliding on and off from the wings, and an abstract overhead design of "balls and aerials" as the Scotsman critic described it. "A handsome if slightly shopwindowfied stage picture" thought Ronald Bryden, and Philip Hope-Wallace also placed the set in the "faintly Bond Street shop window class". Penelope Gilliatt, hostile to the play, was not won over by the beauty of the design: "At the head of Zbynek Kilar's set there is a beautiful abstract complex of telephone wires, but I never saw a place less connected to any world", and for her the very beauty, significance and isolation of objects on stage drained them of robust existence -- "Beatrice puts symbolic white paint on the walls, makes symbolic gold lame curtains and a matching skirt, and buys a symbolic napkin ring ("We're building a home")".
But how else is one to stress the eternal and universal? For the message of the play is more absolute than in Wesker's earlier plays, and as Martin Esslin observed, "Once we have cottoned on to the symbolism of the four seasons, once we know that they will follow their inevitable, relentless course (and we catch on after a maximum of three minutes!), the play is doomed to runon its tramlines to the bitter end. There will be, guaranteed, no surprises". Why should this lead to "the boredom of predictability" however? After all, "inevitable" and "relentless" are terms of high praise in a tragedy -- but then The Four Seasons is not a tragedy, not even a love tragedy. Wesker is not offering a world-picture in which Fate, or the gods, or God, or any other great absolute is in conflict with Man. The Four Seasons is offering a psychological determinism: "We never recover, never" repeat the characters. One falst step predetermines the next, precedents are renewed, and, as Esslin says, tramlines laid down. Adam initially betrayed a childhood sweetheart at school camp, and this boyish incident is presented as having biased his adult life and established a pattern that wrecks his marriage and subsequent love affairs.
In one of the few references to Beckett, Derek Malcolm in the Guardian said "Beckett and others have said all this and more a great deal better"; in theory one can rebut much of the sweeping condemnation of two-handers, cyclical forms and abstract settings by pointing to, say, Happy Days. In theory: but comparisons with Beckett were probably so thin on the ground because on stage the play is very evidently unBeckettian. Wesker did not intend the names "Adam" and "Beatrice" to be taken as meaning "Man" and "the Beloved" (indeed, a French production changed the names to Alan and Catherine and avoided charges of excessive "symbolism"), and these two lovers are not, in their specific behavior, all lovers. ...
The major solid detail of the play was mentioned by everyone except Esslin, and that was the episode in which Adam makes a large and spectacular apple strudel, watched rather grudgingly by Beatrice. The strudel-making is very real, and therefore on a different level from the stage conventions Wesker was using to avoid naturalistic representation -- Beatrice's supposed winter-long immobility, for instance. "The process of making apple strudel is a very dramatic one and involves patience and experience. But actors learn to fence -- why not to cook?" says Wesker's note to the play, and Julian Holland commended the way Alan Bates as Adam "correctly drew out the pastry to its proper transparency by using the back of his hands in the approved Austrian manner". Its very reality pulled it away from the fabric of the rest of the play. Penelope Gilliatt quoted Stanislavsky's discovery that "one of the most fascinating things that can be done on stage is to fry an egg", and maybe such cookery has the sure-fire upstaging effect of performing children and dogs, but, the Sheffield Telegraph said, "When the most absorbing part of a play is an actor's onstage productio of an elaborate apple strudel, something somewhere is wrong with the work as a whole."