In a rare instance of British overstatement, one Londoner remarked recently, “The only thing that really works in England is the theater.” Quite apart from an ingrained cultural tradition and abundant talent, the English theater works because people care.
To begin with, audiences care. In attending the classics, any number of playgoers arrive with the text in hand or purchase it at the theater. Playwrights, actors and the government care. The result is variety and vitality. In the West End, London’s equivalent of Broadway, 28 shows are currently running, compared with 19 on Broadway. Not all are dramatically superior works. They contain wheezy old crowd pleasers like Dame Agatha Christie’s The Mouse Trap, now in its 24th year, and such flimsy sex farces as Let’s Get Laid and No Sex Please, We’re British. Yet a fundamental difference between London and New York City is that the English are basically committed to the play; Broadway is always fervidly panting for the next hit musical to sustain its hectic life. British actors take TV and movie money only to get back on stage.
Since geographical distances are nominal, Britain gains from cross-fertilization between the bustling regional theaters and the London scene. Trevor Griffiths’ Comedians originated at the Nottingham Playhouse. All of Alan Ayckbourn’s recent plays, including Absent Friends, were initially presented at the Library Theater in Scarborough (Yorkshire), where Ayckbourn is director of productions. The underlying significance of the two leading repertory companies, the National Theater (TIME, March 15) and the Royal Shakespeare Company, is not simply that they exist and command ample subsidies but that they represent touchstones by which all members of the English theatrical community can gauge their own quality. A look at three current plays that distinctively measure up:
OTHERWISE ENGAGED by SIMON GRAY
The hero of this laceratingly literate play suffers from cardiac arrest, not physically but emotionally. Simon (Michael Gambon), an affluent publisher, is an impervious monster of urbane civility. If his heart goes out to anything, it is to the punctilious use of English. On the particular day that the drama transpires, he wishes to listen to his new recording of Parsifal in monastic solitude. It is not to be.
The door of his fashionably appointed den proves to be revolving. Through it stream people whose untidy problems and messy personalities make Simon seem almost a genteel charmer, though his witty ripostes are fashioned from barbed wire. His upstairs lodger, a sociology student, enters to cadge money and denounce Wagner as a fascist. Simon’s elder brother, an academic mole, mewls and pules about the disadvantages of not having an Oxford degree.
A drunken critic friend rails against hard-working Australians who will accept any old pay and have reduced him to writing for the Radio Times. A young woman (Jacqueline Pearce) with a manuscript in tow strips to the waist, brazenly daring Simon to ravish and, of course, publish her. Finally, his parched-for-love wife announces that she is pregnant, possibly by a man whom Simon despises. The subtlest alteration in Michael Gambon’s marvelously controlled performance suggests that Parsifal will never sound the same again. No moat of detachment can guard the vulnerable castle of the heart.
ABSENT FRIENDS by ALAN AYCKBOURN
British critics sometimes express surprise that Ayckbourn’s provincial comedies (Absurd Person Singular, The Norman Conquests) find appreciative audiences in the U.S. Perhaps suburbia is not a locale but a compendium of transferable manners and mores.
Certainly anyone can respond to recycled banalities masquerading as conversation, an edgy concern with appearances, the nose sniff of gossip and the binocular gaze at just who is where on the money-and-status escalator. Ayckbourn has honed this knowledge to hairbreadth comic precision.
His latest play incorporates a certain Chekhovian poignance into the humorous social observation. A tea party is being thrown for Colin (Richard Briers) out of sympathy. His fiancee of 14 months has just drowned. Colin’s pal Diana (Pat Heywood) gets the group together, feeling that Colin’s “friends” ought to cheer him up, even though none of them has seen him for three years. The tea is a witches’ brew. When Colin arrives, it is clear that he is inconsolable, in the sense that grief is incomprehensible to him.
He starts by passing around for mutual approbation photos of his dead fiancee. As a catalytic agent full of “power of positive thinking” jargon, he soon reduces everyone either to tears or hysterics. Unwittingly, he unmasks torpedoed marriages, a joyless adulteress (Cheryl Kennedy), blasted careers, lacecurtain carnage. When Colin, played with demonic dexterity by Richard Briers, finally leaves, one of the survivors utters a suburban epitaph: “Nice to sit with your friends now and again. Nice.”
COMEDIANS by TREVOR GRIFFITHS Tragedy unites, comedy divides.
Even ideas about what constitutes comedy are cloudily divisive. “I didn’t think that was funny” or “Why did you think that was so funny?” are the common stuff of daily conversation.
Playgoers are almost forced to ponder the nature of humor by Comedians. It is a hilarious-abrasive, funny-unfunny analysis-cwra-demonstration of why we laugh at all. Six Manchester men with dead-end jobs aspire to be entertainers in workingmen’s clubs, with a possible whack at the London big time. Each act is one leg of a tripod—final warmup, audition, postmortem.
The teacher is an old pro, Eddie Waters (Jimmy Jewel), whose last laugh seems to have long been buried in the creases of his face. As his pupils sprint apprehensively through their routines —ethnic, absurd one liners, godawful —Eddie offers his philosophy of comedy: “A real comedian dares to see what his listeners shy away from, fear to express. A joke releases the tension, but a true joke has to do more than release tension, it has to liberate the will and the desire, it has to change the situation.”
But the audition judge Bert Chal-lenon (Ralph Nossek) holds an opposite view: “Don’t try to be deep. Keep it simple. Any good comedian can lead an audience by the nose. But only in the direction they’re going. And that direction is, quite simply, escape.” The two who follow Challenon’s advice win. The boy (Kenneth Cranham) who goes into a brilliantly pantomimed rage against two cardboard effigies of the middle class loses. What he epitomizes is about as funny as death, the price a British Lenny Bruce might have to pay for acceptance. T.E. Kalem
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