Rock of Ages

By T.E. Kalem

THE FARM by DAVID STOREY

Civilizations crumble. Governments fall. Religions disappear. Entire societies are swept into the dustbin of history. But the family--a perdurable rock of ages--survives.

In The Farm, British Playwright David Storey shows us why, as he did once before in a rather similar play, In Celebration (TIME, June 10, 1974). Storey's essential point is that the family is an entity that surmounts and sustains its component members. There is a price to pay. The warming hug of fondness and care may be too snug for comfort, like the coils of a boa constrictor.

The Yorkshire farm family of this drama seems to be strangling in quasi-incestuous domesticity. The father (Jack Gwillim) is a grizzled apostle of the work ethic and a drinking fool who would shame Dionysus. His three daughters have been properly educated (two are teachers), but the experience has been enervating rather than elevating. The eldest (Debra Mooney) is a creature of broody, caustic resignation. The middle sister (Trish Hawkins) is a sexual tease who refuses to settle for any one man. The youngest (Nancy Snyder) is a political firebrand who posts placards of revolt in her bedroom.

The mother (Ruby Holbrook), a harried peacemaker, has taken up night courses in sociology, anthropology and psychology. Here Storey draws a distinct line between the instinctual blood force represented by the father and arid attempts to control and explain existence through the disciplines of rationality.

The return of a feckless rebel son and would-be poet (Jeff Daniels) stirs embers of memory and excitation in the whole family. The source of his father's greatest hopes and deepest hurt, the boy has come home to announce that he is marrying a middle-aged mother of two whom he will introduce to them. But the event never occurs. After a poisonously bitter quarrel between father and son, the boy leaves home again. Yet a closing breakfast scene clinches Storey's point that the family will go on as immutably as the sun rises and night falls.

Despite variations in accent, the cast is splendid; Gwillim is a whisky-soaked dinosaur of a father. Marshall W. Mason directs with Chekhovian sensitivity.

As for David Storey, 43, winner of three New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards (Home, The Contractor, The Changing Room) within the past six years, he is simply one of the most gifted playwrights alive.

T.E. Kalem

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