Ragni, Gerome - John Weightman
JOHN WEIGHTMAN
Hair comes rather as an anticlimax. The actual performance did not seem to contain any features that have not already been present in other avant-garde productions. (p. 165)
The theme, basically, is another protest against the Viet Nam War. A boy belonging to a drifting herd-like mass of drop-outs receives his call-up papers and, after trying ineffectually to escape his fate, has to submit and is shorn of his anarchistic locks. But these events are commented on wrily, rather than pugnaciously; it is as if the pet lamb of the flock had been snatched from the pastoral bliss of the hippie world and rudely clipped by Them, the grown-ups, the incomprehensible people who run society on the strange assumption that it is a serious, going concern. The flock itself, which keeps scattering and reforming in a manner more animal than human, is a micro-society within society…. What the music seems to suggest is that they are at their happiest...
[The entire page is 521 words long]
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