The function of brand names is not confined to cereal, soups, soap, or the banausic articles normally found in one sort of hypermarket or another. The arts in our modern world could hardly exist without brand names to feed the expectations of the consuming public - or, as theater folk might say, the audience. It is a great help to a producer and his backers if they can market a product with a familiar name, whether it be ancient and august, like Shakespeare, or a twentieth-century mark of quality, like Shaw. This process works almost as well with living figures, often despite the quality of the product. For instance, the name of Andrew Lloyd Webber guarantees massive ticket sales, although his musicals are well known to be kitschy, derivative, and thin -a theatrical equivalent of those fluffy ground-maize snacks that are flavored with esters and monosodium glutamate and packed in plastic bags. (They too enjoy massive sales.)
There are names that arouse higher expectations, and Ronald Harwood is one of them. He is an accomplished dramatist as well as a very successful writer, and his list of credits is impressive. He has published novels and short stories, and he is the biographer of the English actor-manager Donald Wolfit, on whom he based one of his most successful plays, The Dresser. He is not an ivory-tower litterateur but a man who has worked in the theater and can write accordingly, with plenty of success to show for it. Besides The Dresser, the list includes Interpreters, The Deliberate Death of a Polish Priest, Country Matters, A Family, and an adaptation from Evelyn Waugh, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.
Anecdotal Account
Harwood is one of those British who were born to the spirit but not the soil of the mother country. He comes from South Africa, and his new play is not exactly the story, but the more or less anecdotal account of a young South African whose talent - not for writing but for music - takes him to London and then to the wider world.
By all odds Another Time should have worked well. In the hands of a playwright as skillful and smooth as Harwood, even unpleasant characters can rivet the pleased attention of an audience for two to three hours, finally leaving behind that cleansing sense or refreshment that no other medium provides. When all the characters are as sympathetic as they are in this play, the effect ought to be doubled and redoubled. The production offers well-written dialogue spoken by a cast of delightful people, without real villains, but with personal troubles to furnish tension, and a good supply of humor to lubricate the proceedings with incidental amusement. It is a recipe for a good evening, faithfully put together, yet finally the ingredients do not fuse, and the play leaves a flat taste.
Another Time contains a number of elements familiar to Americans, but relatively exotic on the British stage. It is a series of anecdotes from the life of a Jewish family, English immigrants to South Africa. They display all the qualities that have made Jewish family life into such good theatrical material: exuberant vitality, humor, rich emotions, and that peculiar ingredient of Jewish writing that Boris Pasternak described (rather pejoratively) as a blend of irony and facile Weltschmerz.
Nominally, but not really, the play centers on young Leonard Lands and his parents, who are transplanted
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