Oh What A Lovely War

It took the Almighty six days to put together the Creation. Timothy S. Mayer needed nearly twice as long to whip up Oh What A Lovely War, which opened last night at Agassiz. The Lord should have taken more time. Mayer's is the better production.

What greatness there is in Joan Littlewood's World-War-One farrago consists in its showing us in a straightforward way that war is a distinct emotion. One is in love; one is at war. To get that point across a director must give us, infant fashion, a moment-to-moment account of the emotion of everyone on stage, Giggles must end in sucked-in breaths of anguish and operatic voices must descend into fiish market bawl. Everyone on the stage last night seemed to have understood this perfectly, and if they did it is because the director understood it first.

Almost any scene will do for an example. In the first act, Kathryn Walker sings "I'll make a man out of you," a song urging, or enticing, the boys to sign up. When she begins her song there's a jaunty, frolicsome quality to her, something heart-to-heart about what she says. Between measures, it seemed, her voice got hard, her body began to cut sultry pendulum arcs and she was a whore with a nation for clients and patriotism as a negligee. Listening to her and realizing that her song, which had undoubtedly drawn men to death, would be bracketed in the show by laughter--indeed the song itself brought a few laughs--was an experience not in itself laughable.

For another example take the wildly funny scene in which British recruits are drilling with broomsticks. They are imaginging that they hate Germans and imagining that they have guns. The dressing down the recruits get when they don't imagine hard enough is, however, real--they manage to convince you of that by sheer force of good acting. You won't see mime as good as their rendition of a bayonet charge for a long while.

The play, with the exception of a dull scene about scheming capitalists, charges along at just the right sense-upsetting pace. Songs and scenes change from langorous to clanging and the ensemble acting--some--thing one doesn't see very often at Harvard--goes off with the heel-clicking precision of a German officer's salute.

Some of the songs, especially the opener, "Row, Row, Row," needed another day of rehearsal: there was enough random foot-wriggling and arm-moving to be bothersome. The three piece orchestra (two pianos and a drum--kazoo and whistle from time to time) was by itself smoothly professional. It's worth going to hear them if only to convince yourself that honkey-tonk and marches are closer art froms than you realized.

Taken as a whole, the musical numbers were the strongest part of the show. Mayer's Thing is blocking, moving the actors around on stage, and one gets the impression he would be happiest in the middle of a riot. The Agassiz stage is too small for Mayer's most exuberant pageantery, but he puts what stage space there is to fine use.

Because the acting is ensemble, it seems almost unfair to mention an individual actor. "Seems" is not, however, nearly enough to forestall mention of Andrew T. Weil. The man could play a pumpkin seed and people would laugh. Roar. In Lovely War he is at times a German officer and at times a butter-tongued cleric. His reading of the German proclamation of war, in German, could not be done at the speed Weil does it unless he had two tongues.

Lovely War could have come off like talent night at a summer camp or an hour-and-a-half ad for the Women's Strike for Peace. Instead it is grinning barbarism, which, after, all, is what unlovely real wars are like.