British Invasion

By recent standards, the new Broadway season is an unusually good one. What is not unusual is that, with rare exceptions like How to Succeed's Bobby Morse (TIME, Nov. 17), the actors who are drawing the best notices are British. The top three: Paul Scofield, Donald Pleasence and Douglas Campbell.

>Weary Magnificence. Scofield, 39, is Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, a superb testimonial to the seldom-realized potential of the individual conscience. With a kind of weary magnificence, Scofield sinks himself in the part, studiously underplays it, and somehow displays the inner mind of a man destined for sainthood. Not content just to applaud, much of the audience stands and noisily shouts its appreciation for his movingly perfect performance. Appearing in the U.S. for the first time, Scofield was preceded by a reputation hard to live up to. From Kenneth Tynan to Richard Burton, British critics and actors place him among the contemporary greats, ranking him with Olivier and Gielgud. No one who has seen A Man for All Seasons will quibble for a moment. The son of a schoolmaster, Scofield learned his actor's trade as a member of the Birmingham Repertory, played Shakespeare at Stratford on Avon and a brilliant roster of contemporary roles on the London stage. In one of his rare appearances outside the United Kingdom, he was mobbed six years ago by Moscow fans who admired his Hamlet. He has a wild shock of dark, grey-flecked hair and a face that seems to rearrange itself for every role he plays. Tall, diffident and no egoist, he is as disciplined as he is dedicated. Most extraordinary aspect of his genius is, in the words of Critic Tynan, "his power to enlarge a role until it fits him, as a hatter will stretch a bowler."

>Marvelous & Grimy. As the verminous tramp in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker (TIME, Oct. 13), Donald Pleasence, 41, succeeds in creating probably the grubbiest creature who has ever been seen on Broadway, beside whom the average Bowery bum would seem like the twin of Mr. Clean. For all the brilliance of the playwright, The Caretaker would collapse onstage without an actor who could make the old man both repulsive and sympathetic. Like Scofield, Pleasence got his early experience in Birmingham. Enormously popular on British television, he has wide and proven capabilities as a character actor and in leading roles in the West End. His working range runs from comedy through the sinister to the malevolent. Son of a railroad stationmaster, Pleasence is a retiring and almost anonymous man away from work, with a subdued passion for birds, flowers and motorcars (he drives a Jaguar). One curious result of his marvelously grimy performance in Caretaker is that he feels compelled to reassure people that "I do bathe--often. I had a bath a few minutes ago."

>Mean Spear. When Paddy Chayefsky's Gideon was on the road in Philadelphia, Fredric March, who plays God, graciously requested that Douglas Campbell (Gideon) be given equal billing. The gesture was just. Campbell's is a star performance throughout, a convincing portrait of an Old Testament bumpkin who holds earthy colloquy with his Maker ("I can't love you, God, you're too vast a concept") and shivers under the impact of the divine power that enables him to command his tribe and save his people. Campbell, 39, also built the foundations of his career in Britain's repertory companies. Born in Glasgow and married to Actress Ann Casson, daughter of Sir Lewis Casson and Dame Sybil Thorndike, Campbell moved to Canada seven years ago, has become a Canadian citizen, lives in Stratford, Ont., where he is a steady performer and occasional director of the Festival Theater. A strapping, 200-lb. man with curly red hair, he is a vegetarian and a pacifist; in World War II he filed as a conscientious objector. "For a pacifist,'' he says, assaying his present performance as a tribal general, "I thrust a mean spear.'' He does.

Scofield, Pleasence and Campbell only begin the list of British actors who seem to be taking over the U.S. stage. Sir Michael Redgrave lends luster to Graham Greene's otherwise mediocre The Complaisant Lover. John Mills is arriving this month in Ross, Terence Rattigan's play about Lawrence of Arabia, and Eric (Separate Tables) Portman is headed again for Broadway in an adaptation of E. M. Forster's novel A Passage to India.

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