lenneth Hurren on questions without answers

SPmetime during the first of the ti"iree acts of John Hopkins's play, ex t of Kin (which the National heatre has put on at the Old Vic), tile a dozen members of some ghastly suburban family are

gathering together for afternoon ,tea, the husband of the household that is receiving them walks out

'fthoutexplanation. It is possible that he was just miffed at being Interrupted in the assembly of a lislake-it-yoursell toy tank that he 'lad been working on before his hlother and brother, sisters and e Ibn-laws and assorted offspring

flay streaming in; or again, it "lay be that he had come right to

tihe end of his strap and couldn't ace another session of footling 'isrnall talk and bickering and aMily intrigue. Unlike the in

ocently unsuspecting audience, e has the advantage of knowing, °n the basis of past experience, Precisely what is lying in wait. Anyway, his disappearance — ?,flee it has dawned on everybody

that he has disappeared — gives ,ern something more to talk ,'.uout than such compelling quesaon..

as whether they'll have tea 'h the garden or in the house and

hether son or son-in-law is going to drive mother home, and there is

certain amount of lively conjec'Pre as to his whereabouts. Has he

!led the country? Done „soMething, you know, foolish"? 'lad an accident? Run off with another woman?

These are interesting, if perhaps

not terribly interesting, questions, and the mystery generates some mild suspense. Even as I sat there trying fitfully to decide on the most plausible answers, though, I was somehow dismally aware that we were never going to find out. It is that sort of play, the work, evidently, of a man with no particular interest in narrative drama and above the ordinary civilities of playwright to audience. Hopkins plainly feels that his painstaking documentation of the minutiae of suburban life, his profound discovery that a great many family relationships are less cordial than they may superficially appear and, of course, that ostensibly virtuous citizens can have some fairly grubby sexual secrets are sufficiently fascinating in themselves to allow him to dispense with the tedious business of tying up the odd loose end.

I daresay you have news for him, but I should be careful how you say it, for he is apt, to judge from an interview that is recorded in the programme-book, to be sensitive about his work. "I keep telling myself that The Seagull was not well received" he is quoted as saying, "but after one television critic compared me to Dodie Smith I walked out of the house, like Captain Oates." The comparison I had in mind myself, though God I hesitate to say so, is with Ted Willis (as he then was) who used to write television playlets with titles like Look in Any Window and Knock on Any Door, and who doubtless would not have presumed to send one to the National Theatre, even minus the last page of the script, though he might conceivably have tried his luck at the Royal Court, for his domestic interiors tended to be more working-class than those in which Hopkins operates.

That a piece such as Next of Kin, which really has no discernible distinction, should actually be staged by the National Theatre and is, furthermore, so highly regarded there that it is being sent out into the provinces as a sample of the company's work (Brighton next week, Birmingham the week after) — cannot but make me slightly uneasy about the judgment of scripts of the new regime. On the other hand, there are evidently people there who know an actor when they see one. Though a couple of the good performances here are given by

players retained from the old company (Gawn Grainger as the family's vivacious womaniser, and Benjamin Whitrow as a prim and prosperous estate-agent son-inlaw), the others are all contributed by newcomers. They include Gemma Jones, unscarred by a prolonged association with the Brook production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and impressively conveying the fistclenching anxiety and hostility of the woman whose husband has walked out; Antonia Pemberton, Lynn Dearth, Viola Keats and John Gregg as her various in-laws; and James Laurenson as the inscrutable defector.

Harold Pinter directs the piece is lovingly as if he had written it, though I suspect that if he had written it, not only would we not have known where the missing man had gone, we wouldn't have known who had gone. It is a small mercy which you may have with my compliments.

A rather large mercy, deserving tne gratitude of everyone connected with Billy, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, is that Michael Crawford is in it — more or less incessantly — and is amiably talented enough to be worth watching long after the show itself has exhausted its resources of originality, inventiveness and verve. This is a musical treatment of the play by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, Billy Liar, which in turn was a dramatisation of Waterhouse's novel of the same title, about a young man in a glum North Country industrial town who has a hard time uniting the eventful world of his imagination with the depressing realities of his life as an undertaker's assistant that constantly impinge upon it. This material clearly tempted the present adapters because of its opportunities for opening out Billy's self-glorifying daydreams into elaborate production numbers, and they've had one or two happy notions that fit the new format admirably — including an explosive opening scene in which the lad sees himself as the hero of some small but gaudy state for whose grateful public his versatile skills have just won the World Cup, the Eurovision Song Contest and a three-hour war. Somehow, though, these inspirations aren't imaginative enough, plausible enough or consistently witty enough to compensate for the loss of the character analysis and the clues to Billy's inner rebellion that were built into Waterhouse's original conception. Those unfamiliar with previous manifestations of the yarn are likely, I think, to see it as a series of illustrations of a book they haven't read.

There were, of course, some inordinately amusing lines in the some of them o

earlier play and sm

survive; one or tw of the songs are good enough to have an independent future; Crawford's engaging performance fills a lot of gaps; and the ensemble work is remarkably enthusiastic considering the discouragements of a set which, though doubtless an engineering miracle, seemed to me needlessly repellent.