Loneliness Theme Of Double Bill

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30764, 31 May 1965, Page 14

Loneliness Theme Of Double Bill

If you’re sick of the sordid and a little full on farce, then try the Canterbury Repertory Theatre Society’s current production, “The Private Ear and the Public Eye.” The author of this double bill, Peter Shaffer, has a witty ear for words and a clever eye for entertaining situations. His plays make immediate sense, yet have the quality of fantasy—a quality nicely picked up in the sets and costumes.

The first play, “The Private Ear,” takes a very dull clerk who comes alive only in his private world of music. The clerk invites a woman to his flat for what is inevitably the first and last time. Although Vincent Orange used too diffident a voice, he created a personality which was, like Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot, a delicate balance of clumsiness, tenderness, passion and stupidity. His attempted seduction of, and by, Patricia Donovan was wonderfully well-timed: one minute very, very funny and the next unbearably sad. Denis Lili was the over-confi-dent friend who came to negotiate the meeting and stayed to bid on his account: he gave a well-studied performance in which self-centred flamboyance thinly disguised vulnerable ignorance. The three made an excellent team. John Kim’s production allowed the players to drag in the first half, and gave them over-obtrusive moves: but there were some superb moments (the curtain scene for one) which showed the director’s sympathy with Shaffer’s moods.

“The Public Eye” is Shavian argument about the responsibilities of partners in a marriage and the impossibility of re-creating a new personality—perhaps “Candida” spiced with “Pygmalion.” An aging accountant loses contact with his young wife because she insists, in spite of his efforts to change

her from a coffee-bar waitress into a professional man’s wife, on maintaining her own uninhibited identity. Their problems are apparently solved by a “private eye” whose desire to deny himself any private life makes him a refreshingly original comic character. Leo Jarvis bounced delightfully along as this detective-with-a-soul: his compulsive eating was delightful business.

The two plays are complementary in their exploration of loneliness: both plays have as their central character a pathetic clown whose predicament brings sympathy through laughter. Although neither the plays nor the players hit the jackpot consistently, the evening has enough freshness, hilarity, stimulation and engagement to send the audience away feeling that the theatre is a good place to have been in. —P.R.S.