Theatre
Touched by Pleasure
By BAMBER GABCOIGNE
The Private Ear and The Public Eye. (Globe.)—Blitz (Adelphi.) — England Our England. (Princes.) THE first play in Peter Shaffer's double bill is very slight, but successful within its own limits. A sensitive, timid and slightly zany young man, Bob, has asked a breezy friend from the office to help him entertain a girl to supper; but, when she comes, his own gawky seriousness merely embarrasses her and he has to sit back and watch her responding mer- rily to the gruesome bonhomie and savoir seduire of his treacherous friend. When he is at last alone with her, even though he is perfectly aware that the situation has turned sour, some unwritten law forces him to make his sexual attempt. Partly out of pity she gives him a kiss. He abruptly changes gear (almost entirely, one feels, to do justice to his manhood) and starts pursuing her ape-like around the room. A slap and an over-histrionic finale end the play.
The gist of this is familiar in everyone's life and the playwright's only problem is to develop the humour without becoming either con- descending or callous. Peter Shaffer succeeds in this, except perhaps in one or two of the girl's stupider replies, but these are safely rescued by a warmly adolescent performance from Maggie Smith. Terry Scully, too, is excellent as the other nervous virgin.
The second play, The Public Eye, is more am- bitious, but starts less well. Kenneth Williams plays an eccentric private detective who has been trailing a plump accountant's wife. The first scene is written too whimsically, and Kenneth Williams intensifies this impression by making the detective so conscious of his own amusing eccentricities (such as a tendency to picnic off macaroons in the middle of a conver- sation); but as the play gets more serious, both it and Kenneth Williams's performance improve until they end, hand in hand, quite magnificently..
Peter Shaffer shares some of John Mortimer's weaknesses—for humorous misunderstandings ('We're talking at cross-purposes.' 'Not cross, I hope. I don't like scenes') and for coy literary phrases (love-letters 'written in a hot impetuous hand)—but by the end of The Public Eye he is flying high enough to challenge even the master of serious fantasy himself, Jean Giraudoux. The marriage broke up, for example, because the accountant had tried so hard to force his wife into his own sober image; her reaction had been to go to endless horror films alone, which is why he sniffed a lover and hired a detective. Trailing round in the course of business the detective and the wife have fallen into a sort of love. The detective now orders the accountant to do the same and follow his wife in absolute silence for a month wherever she may go; to an art gallery, a park, or even to 'I Was a Teenage Necrophile': It is the only hope for the marriage. This idea is a bril- liantly serious piece of fantasy and it is backed up by many more direct moral precepts, always put with the same lightness. One of them could stand as a motto for a critic: 'There is no sin more unpardonable than denying that you were pleased when pleasure touched you—you can die for that.'
The week's two long-awaited musical shows— created by such limelit names as Lionel Bart, Keith Waterhouse, Willis Hall and Dudley Moore and headed in both cases by stars from Theatre Workshop—are distinctly disappointing. No scene or character in Bart's Blitz! seems touched with imagination, and though the sheer mechanics of Sean Kenny's sets are for• a while intriguing, even they eventually become tiresome, with his vast constructions constantly roaming the stage like hostile Wellsian monsters. Had the musical been any better they would certainly have been distracting enough to ruin it. Matinee ballets in which they go through their paces to the accompaniment of the LP record might be their ideal deployment.
England Our England is one of those revues where a smile smoulders on one's face, but very rarely blazes into a laugh. In other words, many of the ideas are good, but the authors have no idea how to develop them into a sketch or, even more important, how soon to move on to the next one. But Billy Whitelaw is delightfully brassy, as well as being technically far more slick than I had expected. Roy Kinnear, though, is in danger of working too hard for his laughs. His real comic nature is that of a tortoise in a hailstorm who for some reason can't pull his head right back into his shell. Boisterous extro- vert parts do not suit him.
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