My mad mother

It Is Regrettable that the drama Club is not getting the support it is now beginning to deserve. From the tea and chintz of "Billy Liar" to "The Sport Of My Mad Mother" is a movement from repertory towards responsibility. The club owes it to the university to produce plays of interest to more than the actors' relatives. And whatever reservations one may hold about the ultimate success of Ann Jellicoe's play, it makes a serious attempt to understand an important phenomenon.

It is a play about violence, described by the reduction of complex behaviour to significant patterns of speech and action, repeated and varied in a sinister combination of dance and child's game. Specifically, Ann Jellicoe is writing abcut a teenage gang in London. But the play is not a social document, and the boredom and purposelessness that surround the characters do not so much cause as allow the violence in which they are engaged. The title comes from an Indian text: "For life and death are the sport of my mad mother Kali": the action explores a destructive urge that is irrational, the obverse of an inexplicable creativity.

Greta corresponds to the Goddess. As leader of the gang she presides over violence: yet she is pregnant, and the mysterious birth of her child establishes creation at destruction's heart. But though the playwright has made violence palpable, she has not coped with love and growth. The discovery of life in death is quite unrealised, an explanation, not an action. The rhythmic ritual of violence fuzzes into a flurry of words which leave the birth uncomprehended. unrelated to the rest of the play.

There were also fringe annoyances. It is, for example, difficult to know what function Stevie serves. Alienation he may cause, but not perhaps in the sense intended. His gratuitous existence does not so much focus as distract our concern. At best he is a useless, at worst an opaque medium.

But eventually it is the handling of the central theme that must concern us. If the play fails to make coherent its final position, and tends rather to confusion than complexity, an intelligent attempt has nevertheless been made to formulate a difficult and important apprehension. It fails to satisfy us, but strongly stimulates our interest.

Like the play, the acting fell short of complete success: but it was a creditable and interesting failure. The actors' problem was to transfer their energy from the creation of character to buildmg the patterns of violence and incoherence. And because these patterns were not based in character nor. particularly, in situation (this was the point of the play), the actors seemed a little bewildered, as if they did not quite believe in what they were doing. Uncertainty of tone, hesitancy and lack of tension tended to mar the performances.

Sue Lothian, however, acted her small part as Dodo with great sensitivity. Some of her exchanges with Dean (Chris Rosie) achieved the finish which the rest of the acting so narrowly missed through periodic fits of unsteadiness.

Linda Sacklin, as Greta, was a notable exception. Her Australian accent was not a success, but one forgot it in admiring the control and purpose of her acting. When she was on stage the play tended to cohere Hers was a fine performance.—A.M.B.