Teacher's rough and tumble
KENNETH HURREN
Authors with a story to tell such as Simon Gray retails in his new play, Butley, at the Criterion, are usually tactfully evasive about its locale. No such discretion inhibits Mr Gray, who teaches English at Queen Mary College and who has set his play about the crack-up of a homosexual lecturer against a background that might be jocularly described as academic. Not for him the take-your-pick ambiguity of ' Oxbridge ' or the sweepingly unspecific ' Redbrick ' or even the simple reticence of a 'university.' The action takes place, and no bones about it, 'in a College of London University,' a hot bed, if that's the term, of the gay life. Any mention of The Faerie Queene in the English department is apt to be misunderstood as a reference to the college Principal, though this is a title for which competition would seem to be unusually keen. Our anti-hero, Ben Butley himself, is a leading contender, always on the lookout for a likely paramour among the comelier youths of the student body.
Joey, the present object of Ben's rough passion has conveniently graduated to the faculty, but is about to throw over his former tutor in favour, humiliatingly, of an unscholarly type of queer from the North. Butley, in fact, is in for a bad day all around, when we discover him at the start of a new term. Apart from a tedious rearrangement of his curriculum (" You know how it exhausts me to teach books I haven't read "), and his difficulties in evading tutorials with students of innocent earnestness (including one persistent girl, clearly destined for employment as the drama critic of some unreadable quarterly, who is eager to discuss the symbolism of The Winter's Tale), his wife — persuaded that he is always going to be a man's man — announces her intention of divorcing him and going off, further humiliation, with the most boring man he knows. But it is Joey's impending defection that chiefly distresses him It's not for me to say whether you're likely to find any sort of personal identification with Butley in his untidy sex life, but if he is not an immediately sympathetic figure, he is certainly an entertaining one. Contemptuous of illusions, his own and other people's, he has a nice line in mock ing, slightly donnish wit and parodies the pretensions of the academic life with cynical relish. He would be intolerable to have around if tainted with any hints of self-pity or overt effeminacy; but Alan Bates, exploiting all the humour of Ben's sardonic invective, attacks the role like a battered pugilist ready to slug it out to the end if it kills him. Flawlessly directed by Harold Pinter, and well played by all subordinate hands, Butley is not likely to make Mr Gray the most popular man in the staff rooms, but if the going gets too rough, it might well ensure him a fairly comfortable retirement.
Since its cast includes a young woman who lived with me for some years (indeed, until she was pushing eighteen), I must, as they say, 'declare an interest' in Look, No Hands!, a comedy of bantering inconsequentiality by Lesley Storm at the Fortune, in which my interest otherwise resided principally in the comic expertise of Harry Towb. As a harassed film producer, ready to call upon the Sanhedrin, if necessary, to. prevent a scandal breaking over the innocent head of his most valuable contract player, Towb's timing and inventiveness make his performance something for connoisseurs of comedy acting. Gerald Flood and Janet Munro as warring parents, and Gladys Henson as their acidulously pious housekeeper, help to keep the fun bubbling cheerfully.
On the 'fringe,' I can declare no interest at all in Don Haworth's A Hearts and Minds Job, a dire melange of inept characterization and misfiring jokes that expelled me from the Hampstead Theatre Club at the interval, fairly confident, as a non-believer in miracles, that the proceedings were al. ready beyond redemption; but in the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs, there is a worthwhile piece called Boesman and Lena, by the South African writer, Athol Fugard, who ponders, without resort to indignant propagandizing but instead with bleak compassion, the melancholy predicament of ' coloureds ' in his wretched country, and directing it himself, achieves laceratingly good performances from Zakes Mokae and Yvonne Bryceland as jetsam of the veldt.
Previous page
