British Sketchbook

By Martha Duffy, R.Z. Sheppard

The Brooklyn Academy of Music's ambitious British Theater Season (TIME, Jan. 28) has opened its second series: three plays by the Actors Company. The troupe is a two-year-old touring cooperative with more promise than polish. Its rules are truly democratic: all decisions about repertory and casting are made by vote. Butto keep chaos from the door -the director of each production has the usual artistic control. That divided authority may explain the unevenness of the fare. The blasted heath of King Lear would seem to be a British company's natural territory; instead, Shakespeare provides their weakest evening. In Chekhov's Russia, on the other hand, they are at home and even offer some accommodation to R.D. Laing'spsychic tangles.

WOOD DEMON. This seldom produced Chekhov play is known in theatrical texts chiefly as an early version of Uncle Vanya. The familiar characters are here: the young doctor obsessed by forest conservation; the fractious old scholar and his bored young wife; Daughter Sonia and Brother-in-Law George (later called Vanya), who are remnants of his life with his dead first wife. There are five more major characters in this version who are elided or eliminated when Chekhov created a masterpiece out of the same material.

It is a mistake to think of Wood Demon only as a sketchbook for Uncle Vanya. On its own it is an exuberant, if somewhat raveled play. Anyone who has ever watched Vanya or The Three Sisters and wished against all his better aesthetic judgment that one of the attractive, complicated, inhibited egotists would break out and change his lot, will find his fantasies acted out on stage. Though George-played commandingly by Tenniel Evans-shoots himself, Chekhov provides not one but two sets of happy young lovers at the final curtain. In the last act, the young wife, who has briefly left the old professor, remarks that on returning she feels like the ghostly Commendatore in Don Giovanni. As if by magic, the sunnier side of Mozart's spirit seems to possess Chekhov, and he awards men to his maids with the same amused, godlike detachment.

With a large cast and many bursts of jumbled activity, the main challenge in the play is to the director. David Giles meets it, handling pace and actors with more than breezy authority that gives the entire evening a refreshing, spontaneous lilt. "Martha Duffy

KNOTS. One of the central ideas of the oracular psychoanalyst R.D. Laing is that people who are maddened by an irrational society drive each other mad. In his book Knots, a melange of gnomic wordplay, he gave a lively definition of what he meant. For example, he thinks that nearly everyone has come tumbling after an archetypal Jack and Jill caught in such tangles as "I'm upset that you're not upset that I'm upset that you're upset that I'm upset when I'm not."

The Actors Company staging of Knots wraps an hour's worth of such vicious circular logic in music hall routines that include slapstick, songs, juggling, mime and dance. Ironically, the format runs into a Laingian knot or two. The words cannot satisfy the action, which in turn fails to satisfy the words. The reason is that Laing's knots are not truly Gordian but slip; what appears complex comes apart with a simple tug. This may even be the point, but it still leaves the actors-none of whom are Laurel or Hardy, or Gallagher & Shean--striving frantically to make the most of meager material. As a psychological Sesame Street, however, Knots has its moments. Marth Duffy, R.Z. Sheppard

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