Midlands Blues

By T.E. Kalem

ROSE

by Andrew Davies

Glenda Jackson is a buzz saw of an actress and Rose is a toothpick of a play. This sense of imbalance sets the tone of the evening. Jackson possesses a feral magnetism; the play is nerveless, somnolent, inert. She is direct; the play is diffuse. In vocal inflection and delivery, she is a wicked font of wit and irony; the play is parched for either.

Sometimes a dramatist offers one special clue as to his intent, and British Playwright Davies seems to do that when he has Rose quote a line from the German socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg: "It's in the tiny domestic struggles of individual people as they grope towards self-realization that we can most truly discern the great movements of society." The play's title may be an oblique salute to Rosa.

Many British plays of the past two decades are variations on the same theme --the trauma of the Empire's decline and the perplexing frustration of adapting to new modes of thought. Unfortunately, Rose is vapid. One cannot stir a tempest in a thimble. Davies' Rose is a teacher in a Midlands elementary school who is busily donning her New Woman persona on the threshold of middle age. She insists, perhaps understandably, on being called Ms. Strong, instead of Mrs. Fidgett. This flusters Headmistress Smale (Beverly May) and the older staff, as do her theories of education, which smack of the bankrupt experiments of the '60s. She has no use for learning by rote. She wants children to play teachers, to make up their own work assignments, and for every one to "have a lot of fun and excitement, the kids and the teachers." The children, who are never seen or heard, challenge her with their own brand of stimulation. They come in one day and cut up the goldfish and smear excrement on the school walls.

One of the internal contradictions in Rose is that it is presented as a valiant and disquieting quest for identity, whereas Rose makes decisive choices and fails at life. At home her two young children are glued to the telly and her husband Geoffrey (John Cunningham) has to send out for chips to feed them since the fridge is bare. Geoffrey, a personnel manager on the skids, has been crossed off as a crashing bore by Rose, and salves his hurt with a nightly round of the pubs.

Convinced that she is trapped in a "dead marriage," though no proof is offered that she ever nurtured it in the past or the present, Rose is game to have an affair with a personable school supervisor. But all that she and the also-married Jim Beam (J.T. Walsh) manage is a one-night stand in his car.

One could wish that Davies had written another play called Life with Mother: the two scenes shared between Jackson and Jessica Tandy as her mother provide the only emotionally credible moments in the play. Family is the tie that blinds, and the two women take the blindfolds off in affecting sequences, particularly when Tandy, an actress of indelible grace, reveals to Rose moments of tender and tantalizing intimacy with her late husband. The severest irritant in the play is Davies' use of Jackson as a narrator and monologuist addressing the audience directly. This is a drastic "alienation effect" for which Brecht himself would have disowned his disciples. For the rest, Jackson performs Herculean labors, but even Hercules was spared a 13th.

--ByT.E.Kalem

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