"Oh Dad..." disappoints

The First, but not the only thing one found to be annoyed at in the Downstage production of "Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's lung You In The Closet And I'm Feelin' So Sad," was the programme note from the producer. "In fact," says he, "there are only three things in life worth thinking about, religion, art and sex. . . ." Oh, the naughty man. It is difficult to decide whether this remark is worse in isolation, or as part of a corny conclusion about that "ultimate unity . . . the creative energy of the universe."

Unfortunately, the play too suffered from this awkward marriage of the urge to shock with the search for Higher Relevance. The shocks it produced were disparate and irrelevant in sum, so as to annoy us at a kind of deliberate perversity. It was a parade of anger without apprehension of its causes, poses as a metaphor for life.

For why should we interest ourselves in Madame Rose Petal? She manifests some hideously cannibalistic and self-destructive urge, collecting about herself the symbols of battening corruption, the venus fly trap and the kitten-eating piranah fish. Her son, feeding the grotesque plants, feeds his mother's appetite for destruction. Feeding them with stamps (the symbols of communication) and other scraps of civilisation he involves society in his own isolation and spiritual death.

But though these symbols are logically connected and apparently amount to a statement about ourselves, or our American selves, or our Jet-Set selves, they have no base, no anchor in reality. They stem from Madame Rose Petal and demonstrate her sickness, but that sickness is never satisfactorily explained. She is not the psychological victim of her first husband, for she chose him deliberately for just those qualities that he turned out to have. Nor is she the victim of society, for though she seems to demonstrate various of its excesses. In fact she exists apart from it. It flys past her windows in its planes, about its normal pursuits, establishing the normal relationships for which her son yearns. She locks it out —it is unconnected with her shuttered room.

Her mission is to kick sand in the faces of lovers, to embalm her husband, to consume her son, to devour the Commodore. No doubt we may stand accused of all these fallings or crimes in one sense or another. No doubt it is legitimate for the playwright to remind us of the fact, to demonstrate what we are. But Madame Rose Petal in whom they are centralised is irrelevant to us, except in our role of psychologist. Limited to vice, she limits its operation. She has power only over those who have deserted the real world outside. That is why it is so difficult to explain the Commodore's fear—he is not responsible for her condition, and to escape he need only leave the room. Or call a doctor.

She represents no general nemesis, stands for no general self-destruction. She, like the playwright, has wilfully established her own world over against reality and unconnected with it. Her strictures have no relevance. They cause neither revelation nor fear.

Madame Rose Petal, then, is a character who provides no real centre for the indictments made by plot and symbol. That is why these so irritate, why in sum they seem excessive rather than disturbing. For by the grand education scene when the dead father falls from the cupboard and the son smothers his seducer with her discarded skirt we are filled with incredulous annoyance. We have been imposed upon by a tearer-of-hair-in-public attacking wilful fantasies for the edification of the world. We are not grateful for the experience.

Apart from the Bill Boys, one of whom was embarrassingly bad, the actors were a great deal better than the play. The stalk elegance of Raeburn Kirsh's performance as Madame Rose Petal, the deliberation and cruelty of voice and gesture did all that, was possible to redeem the character. Dick Johnstone gave a most polished performance as her son. Alice Frazer played Rosalie with vigour and subtlety, and if Roseabove seemed an inexplicable intruder into the play, a caricature of exceptional naivity and irrelevance, the blame, as usual, lies with Kopit, and not with Robin Gurnsey who acted the part. Derek Nicholson was the producer.—A.M.B.