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THE HOMECOMING is the winner of this year's New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Tony. Any resemblance between the characters in Harold Pinter's absorbing drama and the family next door is purely metaphysical.
BLACK COMEDY mixes a device of Chinese theater with stage business from vaudeville. It is strictly a one-joke play—about the goings-on when the lights go off —but the joke works. Peter Shaffer is the playwright, Michael Crawford and Geraldine Page the leading actors.
Off Broadway
THE COACH WITH THE SIX INSIDES, originally presented in 1962, is Jean Erdman's phantasmagorial interpretation of Finnegans Wake, blending the richness of Joycean language with drama techniques and music and dance in an intensely imaginative evening of theater.
GALILEO, by Bertolt Brecht, is like a formal ballet of the mind in which the prince of science and the princes of the church dance out their accustomed roles. Anthony Quayle makes diction a diadem, leading the Lincoln Center Repertory Company in a highly creditable production.
HAMP, played by Robert Salvio, is an Everyman of World War I, a simple soldier taught not to question but to obey. Brought to the breaking point by years of battle and bloodshed, he flees the front only to find himself caught in the vise of military discipline and law.
AMERICA HURRAH. In three short plays, Jean-Claude van Itallie unravels some skeins of modern life and finds they lead to confusion, saturation and destruction.
CINEMA
MADE IN ITALY. Italian Director Nanni Loy (Four Days of Naples) has pieced together a mosaic of ironic episodes to portray modern Italy. Best of an interesting lot: the scene in which Anna Magnani tries to herd her family across a busy Roman boulevard.
TWO FOR THE ROAD. Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney flash back and forth on a twelve-year marital fray-for-all scripted by Frederic Raphael (Darling) and directed by Stanley Donen (Charade).
CASINO ROYALE. David Niven, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Joanna Pettit and Ursula Andress are all Bonds of one sort or another in this overblown 007 spoof with more herds than scenes.
NAKED AMONG THE WOLVES. The East Germans have made a stark and powerful film about a small Jewish boy who is protected from the Nazis by his fellow inmates of Buchenwald.
ACCIDENT. Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay, and Joseph Losey directed this glacial dissection of passion against the background of a green Oxonian summer.
BOOKS
Best Reading
SNOW WHITE, by Donald Barthelme. A zany, explosive adult version of the old fairy tale, told with Joycean zest by a gifted young (36) anarchist in the world of words.
TREBLINKA, by Jean-François Steiner. Author Steiner's odd theories about the Jews have ignited controversy, but his dramatized version of the uprising by inmates at Poland's infamous concentration camp is icily restrained.
JUST AROUND THE CORNER: A HIGHLY SELECTIVE HISTORY OF THE THIRTIES, by Robert Bendiner. A rollicking, impressionistic recollection of the absurdities that flourished during the Great Depression.