Enter Poet, Laughing

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A strolling player--or was he a wandering minstrel, or even a poet?--pitched his tent on Broadway last week. The show he proceeded to put on--The Lady's Not for Burning (see above)--made the very neon signs flush with youthful colors; the street's familiar smells of cheap popcorn and theatrical ham were overblown with a strangely innocent perfume. In the midst of the prosaic November which for decades has frozen the English-speaking stage, poetic roses were all at once in bloom.

New Yorkers had heard London's loud applause for Christopher Fry last season. They were curious about him and prepared to be critical. Last spring, a few of them had seen his A Phoenix Too Frequent (whose wry brilliance had been dulled by a second-rate production). This season, a lot more of them will see a lot more of him. In addition to The Lady, Broadway will see Fry's translation of Jean Anouilh's charming French fairy-tale farce, Ring Round the Moon, which opens next week, and some time soon Sir Laurence Olivier will present Fry's Venus Observed.

Like a Drink & a Kiss. The first-nighters for The Lady's Not for Burning assembled in the customary coquettish melee of a Broadway opening, the day's trivia still buzzing in their ears, its annoyances, despite the anesthetic of dinnertime Martinis, still hot under their collars. The curtain rose. Actors began to speak. The hero introduced himself:

Thomas Mendip.

My well-born father, If birth can ever be said to be well,

maintains A castle as draughty as a tree. At every sunset,

It falls into the river and fish swim through its walls*

(The language was unmistakably English, but characters do not talk that way on Broadway stages.)

A young girl made her entrance:

Coming in from the light, I am all out at the eyes.

Such white doves were paddling in the sunshine

And the trees were as bright as a shower of broken glass

(This was evidently poetry.) A young woman rushed in, fleeing from a witch-hunting posse. The townsfolk, she explains, accuse her of raising the dead:

For instance, Helen comes,

Brushing the maggots from her eyes,

And, clearing her throat of several thousand years,

She says 'I loved . . .'; but cannot any longer

Remember names. Sad Helen. Or Alexander, wearing

His imperial cobwebs and breastplate of shining worms

Wakens and looks for his glasses, to find the empire

Which he knows he put beside his bed.

Most of the first-nighters had come prepared to endure verse, and high falutin verse; but few had been prepared to hear anything quite like this. With a mixture of pleasure and outrage, the audience began to realize that this fellow Fry was breaking all the rules. He was not only pursuing the chancy and self-conscious enterprise of writing verse for the stage; he was writing verse which, like a drink on a hot day or a kiss on a cold night, gave pleasure and satisfaction. That other rule-breaker, T.S. Eliot, had written a magnificent and entertaining verse play in The Cocktail Party; but its verse was so discreet that it usually sounded like prose, and its sobering moral sent the audience stumping out of the theater on its knees, pricing bad bargains out of the corner of its eyes. Fry's audiences prance out into the welcoming night, their eyes peeled for a pretty girl to hug or a fellow being to clap on the shoulder.

Quean & Old Maids. Whatever Fry's faults--and his exuberance bursts with faults, as with virtues--he has put both arms under poetry and bounced hef back on the stage. And the poetry he so manhandles is not a girl with short-cropped hair and horn-rimmed glasses, but a lively quean who can dance, weep and love, and values nothing so much as a warm heart and a glad eye. Writes the New York Times's Brooks Atkinson, noting Fry's faults as a dramatic technician: "Mr. Fry may be a little deficient in talent, but he has a touch of genius."

It was time somebody like Fry came along. Poetry and the theater were beginning to regard themselves, and to be regarded, as hopelessly frigid old maids. .

For over half a century, the Western theater has been dominated by the coldly paternal influence of the great Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg--social conscience and psychological drama. This dramatic realism swept the charming Victorian puppets off the stage and replaced them with disagreeable people; it produced excellent playwrights and at least one genius--Shaw. For the paper cutouts of Victorianism it substituted newspaper cutouts, transformed the stage into a lecture platform and the playwright into an amateur reporter, reformer and psychiatrist. The few English-speaking playwrights who attempted metrical dramas usually produced verse as feeble as Maxwell Anderson's. They were afraid of poetry. Fry goes after the lady as boldly as if his name were Shakespeare or Marlowe.

Fry is dead set against the "realism" which demands characters who talk and act "like real people." Says he: "The realistic play is not realistic at all, but just a slice off the top of existence. Writing a realistic play is like meeting a human being for the first time. The realist would observe that this is Mr. So-and-So, that he has a beard and an accent and a mole on his face. But the human being is far more peculiar, something that has gone on since the beginning of time, now miraculously summed up in the strange sort of mysterious creature that stands before us."

Fry's characters are not copies of people but metaphors on man. They talk their heads off in cartwheeling leaps of language which in a drawing room or on a radio program would probably shatter the bric-a-brac or the microphone. But they are real: they reveal, almost with each line spoken, something of the perpetually mysterious character of human.nature; their laughter and their tears ring true; the theatricality of their action, the preposterousness of their language seem, after a while, quite as natural as a lesser theatricality, a lesser preposterousness.

Despair & Hope. The people in Fry's plays rarely make a flat statement; they prefer parabolas or pictures in the air. A young girl, instead of saying that she dislikes a suitor, says, "Humphrey's a winter in my head." And the suitor, seeing the kind of girl he's up against, does not say straight out that he wants to hug her because she's so pretty he can't help it; instead he says:

. . . And if existence will

Molest a man with beauty, how can he help

Trying to impose on her the boundary Of his two bare arms? . . .

Loveliness is often framed in laughter: . . . the moon is nothing

But a circumambulating aphrodisiac

Divinely subsidized to provoke the

world Into a rising birthrate . . .

Fry shakes a metaphor like a wet dog shaking himself dry. A man is broken "on the wheel of a dream"; the night wind passes "like a sail across/ A blind man's eye"; an old house "looks as though the walls had cried themselves/ To sleep"; a happy character "sits and purrs/ As though the morning were a saucer of milk"; the fields of grain move "like a lion's mane"; flowers gather "like pilgrims in the aisles of the sun"; the morning leaves "the sunlight on my step like any normal/ Tradesman." Fry's most persistent and most moving theme is the perpetual dialogue between despair and hope, the death wish and the life urge. In The Lady's most beautiful scene, Thomas Mendip speaks to Jennet, the heroine:

. . . Just see me

As I am, me like a perambulating Vegetable, patched with inconsequential Hair, looking out of two small jellies for the means Of life, balanced on folding bones, my sex

No beauty but a blemish to be hidden Behind judicious rags, driven and scorched

By boomerang rages and lunacies which never

Touch the accommodating artichoke Or the seraphic strawberry beaming in its bed:

I defend myself against pain and death by pain

And death, and make the world go round, they tell me,

By one of my less lethal appetites: Half this grotesque life I spend in a state

Of slow decomposition, using

The name of unconsidered God as a pedestal

On which I stand and bray that I'm best

Of beasts, until under some patient

Moon or other I fall to pieces, like

A cake of dung. Is there a slut would

hold This is her arms and put her lips against it?

And Jennet replies:

Sluts are only human. By a quirk Of unastonished nature, your obscene

Decaying figure of vegetable fun

Can drag upon a woman's heart, as though

Heaven were dragging up the roots of hell.

What is to be done? Something compels us into

The terrible fallacy that man is desirable

And there's no escaping into truth. The crimes

And cruelties leave us longing, and campaigning

Love still pitches his tent of light among

The suns and moons.

You may be decay and a platitude

Of flesh, but I have no other such memory of life.

You may be corrupt as ancient apples, well then

Corruption is what I most willingly harvest.

You are Evil, Hell, the Father of Lies; if so

Hell is my home and my days of good were a holiday:

Hell is my hill and the world slopes away from it

Into insignificance. I have come suddenly

Upon my heart and where it is I see no help for.

Above the Echoes. Fry carries echoes of many poets--moderns like Eliot, 19th-Century Romantics like Keats. But his deepest echoes go further: to the poetic dramatists of the Elizabethan age. Some of the words he puts in Thomas Mendip's mouth sound like Hamlet in the Forest of Arden, or a most unmelancholy Jaques.

Over & above the echoes, what does Fry say? Little or nothing, say some of his critics. Says a fellow playwright: Fry has simply found "new ways to express old trivialities." Fry's chosen topics are not social problems. They are perhaps much smaller, perhaps much larger. He writes about the love life of a middle-aged duke (A.D. 1950); about the budding of Christianity from tiny scattered seeds in pagan England (A.D. 596); about Moses in Egypt (1200 B.C.).

Says Fry: "What I am trying to say is that life itself is the real and most miraculous miracle of all. If one had never before seen a human hand and were suddenly presented for the .first time with this strange and wonderful thing, what a miracle, what a magnificently shocking and inexplicable and mysterious thing it would be. In my plays I want to look at life--at the commonplaces of existence--as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time."

Hornpipe at Six. Christopher Fry turned his first corner almost 43 years ago in Bristol. For 38 of his 42 years, he lived close to poverty. Fry's father was a poor architect named Charles Harris, who had a hankering to be a clergyman. Just as he finally began to prosper in his trade he decided to chuck it and take to lay missionary work in the Bristol slums. He took to drink besides. When he died, his widow had to take in boarders, but managed to send Christopher to a decent school. Later he assumed his mother's name ("It was a matter of euphony") and her Quaker faith. He never became a practicing Quaker; but he sends his son to a Quaker school and has a deeply Christian faith.

From an early age Christopher had a yen for the theater. At six, he appeared on the stage, in a civic pageant, and got his first critical notice. Said the local paper: "A lively and comely lad of tender years performed a hornpipe."

An elderly schoolmistress aunt introduced young Christopher to the beauties of English by reading to him from the Bible and The Pilgrim's Progress. At eleven he wrote his first play, a farce, at twelve his first poem, at 14 his first verse play, never produced. Young Fry did not do well in school, stood last in his class in English.

At 17, he gave up trying to educate himself, and turned to teaching others, then bolted back to the stage and a job with a repertory company. After another interlude at teaching (during which he managed to save -L-10), Fry got a job as secretary to a popular songwriter, and wrote some songs himself which, however, failed to become popular. After a turn as a cabaret entertainer, he moved into an abandoned country rectory, together with a writer friend, 100 books and a large barrel of beef, to write a verse play. They finished the barrel, but not the play.

Fry kept a job as an actor's understudy long enough to buy a new shirt and, largely on the strength of it, got a job as director of the Tunbridge Wells Repertory Theater, which several years later went broke. So did Fry. Next he was commissioned to write a play fof a charitable organization, Dr. Barnardo's Homes, which runs orphanages all over England. The play was called Open Door and dramatized the life of the founder, John Barnardo; Fry toured England with it for two years. In 1936,

Fry married Phyllis Hart, a journalist. By 1938, recalls Fry, "we finally got to the point that we had no money at all."

Just at that point a cousin conveniently died, leaving Fry a small legacy and enabling him to start work on his first important play, The Boy with a Cart, a pageant celebrating the 50th anniversary of a village church, and The Tower, another pageant, on the history of Tewkesbury Abbey. Both plays recalled the manner, if not the grandeur, of T. S. Eliot's religious pageant, The Rock; they also showed a humor and a lyricism that was Fry's own. Eliot himself was impressed by The Tower. Another pageant by Fry, Thursday's Child, was performed at Albert Hall, with Queen Mary in attendance. Fry, who had reluctantly rented a morning coat for the occasion, was supposed to be presented to Her Majesty, but as the royal party entered, he got trapped behind the door of the box.

At the start of World War II, Fry became director of the excellent Oxford Playhouse (where he made friends with Pamela Brown). As a Quaker he refused to bear arms.

Cheer from Coffins. Conscientious Objector Fry was assigned to a Pioneer Corps outfit cleaning up rubble all over bombed Britain. He converted his tough sergeant to Shakespeare and occasionally awed him, when he gave what Fry considered unreasonable orders, with a geyser of Falstaffian curses. After war's end, his Phoenix ran for 64 performances in London's West End. Wrote one critic: "Mr. Fry could make a ghoul laugh ... He gets more cheerfulness out of coffins than most people would from the abolition of bread rationing."

Searching for a plot that would serve as megaphone to his ebullient feelings (he always has difficulty inventing plots), Fry bought, read and discarded twelve volumes of short stories, finally found an old German short story about a man who wanted to be hanged.

Fry finished The Lady's Not for Burning in eight months, writing mostly between 10 p.m. and dawn in a shed behind the small laborer's cottage outside Shipton under Wychwood, Oxfordshire. There Fry, his wife Phyl and their son Tarn (now 13) led a cramped but affectionately restful life. Lady brought almost unqualified huzzahs from the London critics and ran for almost 300 performances. Sir Laurence Olivier, who can tell a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is southerly, commissioned Fry to write Venus Observed (Fry's favorite among his plays). During one week, four of Fry's plays were running in London. Fry knew just what to do with his new-found prosperity: he had a bathroom added to his cottage, to take the place of an outdoor privy.

News from Biggleswade. Except for the bathroom, Fry's way of life has not greatly changed. The Frys have rented a town house (with servant) and they indulge their passion for flamboyant antiques (including a gaudily carved Venetian bed). But they still drive a 1939 Vauxhall and avoid London's social whirl. Mrs. Fry still does the cooking and darns her husband's socks. Fry is a squirrel-like, rumpled, reticent man with a gentle genius for making friends (when he rides in a cab he likes to buy the cabby a beer). Fry's idea of a good evening is to sip whisky and black rum with old theatrical cronies.

Fry likes to compose Tin Pan Alley-like tunes (sample titles: Touch Wood and Sailing Home-), and writes an occasional parody of the classics such as his version of Macbeth in which the three witches are girl reporters and Lady Macbeth sings a, sultry little number, "I've got those Dunsinane, Dunsinane blues." "Kit," as his friends call him, is addicted to puns (sample: on a tour of Scotland Fry complained of "Bonny Highland lassitude")-He dislikes travel but likes walking trips, and has trudged all over England, Wales and Scotland. He is steeped in British history. Says a friend: "If he writes a letter from Biggleswade, he is sure to have an anecdote about the night Boswell slept there."

Fry's fellow playwright James Bridie has predicted, with a slight wrinkling of the nose, that "we are on the point of moving into the era of Christopher Fry." Whether or not this prophecy comes true, Fry brings an important gift to the theater of his time. His liberated language and his liberating laughter will perhaps rise above the dirges--and the snickers--of his generation. It is a laughter that echoes neither satire nor malice nor hysteria, but gladness. Fry does not laugh at man--he laughs because he is a man, and likes being one. Writes Christopher Fry in London's Adelphi magazine: "Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair: a narrow escape into faith. It believes in a universal cause for delight, even though knowledge of the cause is always twitched away from under us . . . In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy eternity is a moment . . . Somehow the characters have to unmortify themselves: to affirm life and assimilate death and persevere in joy . . . not by a vulnerable optimism but by a hard-won maturity of delight. . . Joy (of a kind) has been all on the devil's side, and one of the necessities of our time is to redeem it . . ."

His faith is summed up in a speech from The Lady--a. joyful Te Deum asserted against his century's sad Nunc Dimittis:

What is deep, as love is deep, I'll have Deeply. What is good, as love is good, I'll have well. Then if time and space Have any purpose, I shall belong to it. If not, if all is a pretty fiction To distract the cherubim and seraphim Who so continually do cry, the least I can do is to fill the curled shell of the world With human deep-sea sound, and hold it to The ear of God ...

* All quotations by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.

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