Pride of the London Season

By T.E. Kalem

The current hits range from madcap hilarity to Shakespeare

On Broadway straight drama is a waif, proffered an occasional crumb of grudging acceptance; in London it sits at the head of the theatrical table dispensing "a largess universal, like the sun." Herewith a sampler of three offerings--a scintillant farce, a strong message play and a classic:

NOISES OFF

by Michael Frayn

Farce is the art of not keeping madness at bay. Michael Frayn has written an insanely funny play on precisely that premise. Act I of Noises Off consists of the dress rehearsal of Act I of Nothing On, a play that is about to tour the provinces. The set is a cheerfully bright living room with stairs leading up to bedrooms and a clothes closet. The house appears to be deserted. But no, Mrs. Clacket (Patricia Routledge), the housekeeper, is on the premises. Routledge is a one-woman aviary, walking, cawing and almost flying like a bird.

Soon, a real estate agent (Nicky Henson) appears, not to show the house but to have a weekend shack-up with his Popsy (Rowena Roberts). He knows that the couple who own the house have slunk off to Spain for a tax dodge. What he does not know is that they are about to slink back. In no time, sheiks and burglars are added to the mix, along with the mandatory defrocking of women and the depantsing of men and doors popping open and slamming shut as if by the ghost of Feydeau.

Except that one door is adamantly stuck. It is one more maddening problem for the director (Paul Eddington), who divides his time between lechery and Valium. He has to cope with a woozy old ham (Michael Aldridge) who makes only two kind of entrances: pre-cue and post-cue. "I thought I heard my voice," he says blearily. And then there is the Stanislavski Method actor who wants a profound psychological reason as to why he has to exit with a plate of sardines.

Sexual liaisons and betrayals have turned the cast into a nest of hissing adders by Act II. They have to hiss; the setting is backstage during an actual performance of Nothing On at Weston-super-Mare. Eddington hands out three gifts: a bouquet of flowers, a bottle of whisky and an ax. These pass from hand to hand as swiftly as batons in a relay race. The action is a testimonial to Director Michael Blakemore's tornado pace and stopwatch timing.

Act III falters a bit, but by then Frayn has piled up a mountain of laughs. He has also contributed a highly perceptive analysis of the fragile, precarious nature of that potent illusion known as theater. If Pirandello had ever written a farce, this would be it.

GOOD

by C.P. Taylor

Overhead, arcing tiers of lights blaze down on a few scattered folding chairs and an upright piano with a high sounding board. But the only significant illumination in Good is internal; this is a drama that takes place entirely inside one man's mind.

Haider (Alan Howard) is a kind of academic Walter Mitty. But unlike Thurber's daydreamer, Haider has fantasies of failure, doubt and dread. Something dreadful does actually happen to him, and the question-and-answer core of the late British playwright C.P. Taylor's play is how and why. How does a seemingly decent, liberal-minded man like Haider, who lectures on the German classics at the University of Frankfurt, and whose best friend Maurice (Joe Melia) is a Jewish psychoanalyst, wage a retreat from conscience that finds him at Auschwitz as the right-hand man of Adolf Eichmann (Nicholas Woodeson)?

Taylor takes the tack that Haider is a victim of flattery, subtle intimidation and an inordinate love of the uniform. Out of the emotional stress accompanying his mother's senile dementia, Haider has written a pro-euthanasia novel. It conies to the Fuhrer's attention, and Haider admits to "the surge of pride in me! Reading that scrawled sentence in Adolf s shaky hand--It said: 'Written from the heart!' "

Haider's father-in-law suggests that he join the party, and he does. A major in the SS and an old World War I buddy (Pip Miller) suggests that he join the Nazi officer elite corps and he does. As a member of the SS he could secure the tickets to Switzerland for which Maurice pleads, but he is, by now, too self-intimidated to do so.

Orders are a chloroform he almost welcomes, for they put to sleep his sense of right and wrong. Thus he becomes chairman of the book-burning committee at his university and, resplendent in his SS uniform, goes out to police the burning of synagogues. His adoring mistress (Felicity Dean) convinces him that if they are good to each other and hurt no one knowingly, they are intrinsically good.

It might be possible to care more about Haider and his plight if he were not such a typically alienated antihero. The hero of the evening is Alan Howard. His is a meticulously stylized performance and a memorable display of the actor's craft. Howard's array of arid classroom gestures and pinched facial nerves is matched by a voice that barks, chokes, melts and freezes. And when he does a close-to-floor-level, slow-motion goose-step, the monstrous history of the Third Reich seems to be marching past.

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL

by William Shakespeare

An old saw in racing circles has it that a Thoroughbred will always return to its best form. The Royal Shakespeare Company is certainly a Thoroughbred. After a stumbling start with Henry IV, the R.S.C. returns to top form at its new home, the Barbican Theater, by making the rarely performed All's Well That Ends Well an evening of enchantment.

All's Well is a difficult play, partly because it embraces tantalizing contradictions. It is romantic and antiromantic. It is rational in discourse, yet a strange current of magic, mystery and folklore courses through it. Even its lovers are drawn to each other only as opposites. Helena (Harriet Walter) is deep, pure and singleminded; Bertram (Philip Franks) is shallow, lecherous and two-faced.

Director Trevor Nunn, who can thread the needle's eye of nuance and possesses a searching eye for detail, has set the play in what the late Kenneth Tynan called "a timeless Edwardia." Helena, a kind of lady-in-waiting to the Countess of Rossillion (Peggy Ashcroft), burns with love for "a bright particular star," the countess's son Bertram. A physician's daughter, Helena follows Bertram to the Court of France and cures the mortally ill King (John Franklyn-Robbins).

As a reward, the ruler promises her the hand of any noble in his court. Helena chooses Bertram. Aghast, the snobbish youth flees to the Florentine wars, leaving word that he will only acknowledge Helena as his wife when she secures the ancestral ring on his ringer and is pregnant with his child. To cut the Gordian knot of the plot, Helena achieves just that.

Apart from the lustrous leading players, each major-minor role is played in stellar fashion. Stephen Moore makes of Bertram's boon companion, Parolles, a pompous, endearing rogue and braggart, a mini-Falstaff. The countess's clown (Geoffrey Hutchings) is Lear's fool, in wit though not in pathos. And Robert Eddison, as adviser to the King, is an elegant paradox, a wise Polonius.

In Japan, when a theater is inaugurated, the stage is blessed in a religious ritual. In England, the players bless the stage by taking it. --By T.E. Kalem

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