Row over Cambodia aid

I went the other night to see the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann make her first American stage appearance, not in Swedish – which is the language she talks in Mr Bergman's films – but in English. She's playing here in Ibsen's 'A Doll's House', but I fancy it's less of a tribute to the memory of Ibsen than to the present idolatry of Miss Ullmann. But the day after the opening night, every seat was sold for the rest of the engagement.

Miss Ullmann, by the way, prefers to be known as Ms – Miz – Ullmann, a title packed with mystery, which does imply, however, that you're talking about somebody who is neither a Miss nor a Mrs and it does seem just right for a lady who was once married and has also had a child out of wedlock. But Ms, though it's clear enough in print, is a difficult word to say in English and, without her permission, I shall call her Miss. 

The audience was, for long stretches, almost paralysed into silence, though, again, I had the feeling this was due less to the original power of Ibsen's play than to the audience's reverence for Miss Ullmann as a screen star. I ought to say that, for myself, I was uncomfortable throughout, probably because I was in Row N for Ms Nancy. Miss Ullmann is such a tiny person with features that, at that distance, preserve a doll-like fixity but I found it hard to know when she had something, or nothing, on her mind when she was getting ready to be outraged, or getting ready merely to tidy up the living room. Miss Ullmann, in a word, is to me such a 'cameo' person that her talent can best be seen where you see it, in a movie house, (at) about three feet from her face. 

I don't think it's an accident that, for me anyway, her most powerful film is the recent 'Scenes from a Marriage' which was made for Swedish television. That's it, she is like Henry James, made for television. I bring in Henry James because he's the most spectacular case I know of of a writer whose liveliest ambition was defeated by the stage conventions of his day. He yearned to be a successful playwright and he put on three plays, I think, which folded Saturday night. Because, in his day, there were no microphones and the audience was usually, so to speak, in Row N and what the theatre of the time called for was the big gesture, the commanding features and voices that clanged like bells. But if you adapt Henry James with any skill to television, he's superb because his world was one in which a single syllable, or the flicker of an eyelid could wreck a life or a marriage. 

Well, when it was over, I went home, still feeling a little boorish about Miss Ullmann and I puttered around my books and looked up reviews of other great actresses who had played Nora in 'A Doll's House'. I'm sorry to tell you it does not help. And while I was wondering and worrying why this should be so, I went off to bed with Max Beerbohm's book of criticism of plays that he'd reviewed over the turn of the century. And I came on this: 'If I am not very careful, I shall soon have that deadliest of all assets – a theatrical library. 

'Week in, week out, they come drifting to me, these dreadful, innumerable volumes about actors dead and forgotten. Why are these volumes written? Why should anyone presume to remember things which are, and ought to be, forgotten? Why these desperate raids on oblivion? Who wants to know that the mantle of Macready was modestly assumed by his brave and faithful lieutenant, Samuel Phelps, one of the great actors of the century whose noble work at Sadler's Wells can never be forgotten? 

'The fact is', Beerbohm goes on, 'that the noble work of the nineteenth century at Sadler's Wells had been forgotten – clean forgotten – except by those persons aged enough to remember it. If Samuel Phelps had possessed in his theatre a combination' – now, listen to this, I'm not translating into modern American -–'if Samuel Phelps had possessed in his theatre a combination of a phonograph and biograph to enable us to appreciate his abilities as clearly as those of any actor who is disporting himself tonight, then no doubt he might mean something to us. Perhaps there will soon be some such invention and then our grandchildren will not yawn when they listen to our reminiscences of early twentieth-century mimes'. 

Well, as we all know, such an invention was with us only 30-odd years after Mr Beerbohm wrote. But the situation is not much better. Filmed versions of actual stage performances are still pretty awful, suggesting a group of players locked in an empty drawing room and bawling to get out. And not many fine stage actors can shrink their gestures into their faces and bring their voices down from the tone of a royal proclamation to a whimsical aside, spoken, say, in a railway carriage. To our grandchildren we can still say, 'There is Garbo. Marvel or leave her!' But we can only say, 'You should have seen Henry Ainley or Forbes-Robertson', or whoever, and in a few years we shall, alas, only be able to say, 'Well, you should have seen Paul Scofield or Laurence Olivier, or Peggy Ashcroft.' 

This was brought home to me with painful force the other day when I was up at Harvard lecturing to some students about film. Making the point I've just tried to make to you, I wanted to say that one of the supreme film actors of any time was Gary Cooper. They looked back at me with glazed eyes which said, 'Who he?' 

Well, my visits to the theatre are infrequent interruptions in a life which rambles between people, books, politicians, movies, music and the golf course. And though I'd not meant to go on about the sad fact that once a great stage actor has gone, he's lost his lease on immortality. 

I now see that this was a way of putting off an uncomfortable analogy that struck me when I opened the paper the morning after the night with Ibsen and Miss Ullmann. For as with the emotions stirred, briefly, in the theatre, so with the emotions stirred by a war, but only when it's on. 

I'm thinking of the tragic choice I mentioned at the end of the last talk which the Congress of the United States is going to have to make, to pay out millions more dollars to try, at best, to stall the advance of the Communists in Cambodia or to cut off all funds and then be blamed for the consequences, which are going to be dire either way, of a Communist takeover. 

I don't imagine that you, wherever you are, unless you happen to be listening in Malaya or possibly Australia, are greatly fired up about the fate of Cambodia. Nor, for that matter, the probably similar fate of Vietnam. And in realising how hard it is at this distance to convey not so much the complex facts of the war in Cambodia but the furious emotions it's giving rise to in the United States. 

I thought the best way I might do it would be to recall the similar fury of emotion aroused in Britain, and only mildly echoed elsewhere, by the Boer War. And then I realised that the emotions of the Boer War itself are as dead in Britain as the great figures who strutted and boomed across the last years of the Victorian stage. It is, I guess, one of the... one of the lessons of history, that the lessons are learned only by the generation that can't use them. 

I'll try simply to tell you the raw facts of Cambodian row and hope you can guess from it why it's arousing such feelings. President Ford wants over $200 million in weapons and supplies for Cambodia to shore up its collapse. Even the president doesn't talk, as three previous presidents did over Vietnam, about helping the Cambodians win. There's no hope of that. If they don't get the money, he says, they'll have to surrender, and the first domino will have fallen. 

Congress, hearing through every post from its depressed cities and the unemployed, was so indisposed to give anything at all that a delegation from Congress made a fast trip to Cambodia and came back with a few of its doves ready to turn, so to speak, into hawks. Enough anyway to convince a sub-committee of the Senate to vote four to three to put up $125 million. A House sub-committee split three to three to give $45 millions a month so long as President Ford could prove that it was helping towards a negotiated settlement. 

Nobody seems to stop to ask why the Communists, on the verge of total victory, should want to negotiate. The White House itself admits that the fall of Cambodia is a matter of weeks away, but now the House Foreign Affairs Committee has voted against any more aid. So the prospect that Congress itself will vote any money is just about hopeless. The committee votes that switched from no to yes came from people who said that the money would help an orderly transition or a transfer of power. Well, again, do you suppose that Wellington, in the last minutes of winning Waterloo, was ready to call the battle off and arrange an orderly transfer of power to Napoleon? 

The conservatives in this country, which is the right-wing Republicans and others, have correctly spotted this hypocrisy and say we should in fact be financing nothing more than a noble scuttle. They're angry, in spite of the popular exhaustion over Cambodia and Vietnam because, they say, we gave our word to help Cambodia, as we did South Vietnam and now we're welching on it. And, they say, the word of the United States will be mud among all the nations that once heard John Kennedy promise, 'We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardships, support any friend, depose any foe, in order to ensure the survival and the success of liberty.' 

Well, those stirring words are as dead as Sir Henry Irving's recital of Henry V at Agincourt. The Congress is not disposed to pay any price, not even $40 millions a month, nor are the unemployed willing to meet any hardship to assure the survival of Cambodia or, after all these years, a tottering and quite likely a corrupt government in Vietnam. 

The president says if we don't support Cambodia now, the country will suffer a bloodbath. But it's already up to its waist in blood. The big question is whether this country has a sacred obligation to help these two countries fight on and on. And if the Congress withholds the money whether, as the administration contends, the world will shudder at America's faithlessness. 

Frankly, nobody seems to have consulted the world. The question is far better answered not by us but by you.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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