DOG HELPS LUV’ ENTERTAIN

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31519, 6 November 1967, Page 12

DOG HELPS LUV’ ENTERTAIN

“If it be love indeed, tell me how much ” “There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned.” Antony’s shrewd reply to Cleopatra might well be taken as the theme of vMurray Schisgal’s “Luv,” which opened at the Repertory Theatre on Saturday. But times have changed, as Schisgal’s spelling attests: “Love,” both the word and the emotion it attempts to describe, has become a cheap synthetic manufactured out of the slick platitudes of the consumer age. “Luv is the perversion of love. I don't have the audacity to define the other,” writes the author.

Still, perhaps it is possible to approach a definition of love by showing what it is not; and Schisgal’s anti-defi-nitions provide just enough genuine satire to give bite to a very entertaining play. Jean Harris’s set is delightful. The play exists less as a vehicle for “serious” ideas than as an exhaustive and exhausting exercise for three actors, who are given the opportunity to horse about with—and perhaps indulge themselves in—an incredible variety of improvisations, routines and fantastic posturings. For Antony Abeson, who produced, the evening was something of a triumph. Extrovert, even frenetic, his work requires more discipline and less emphasis in places: it is perhaps a little noisy and imperative in its demands that we be mightily amused. But on the other side of the coin is the robustness, the visual inventiveness, the | spontaneity of a production that fairly sails along on a, stream of broad comedy. As for Mr Abeson’s acting, it far surpassed anything he had yet revealed. His lovable Harry Berlin was rather like a scraggy sackful of ankles and knees, topped off by a head which reminded one now of a hairy, honey-and-lo-custs rabbi, now of the children in “Peanuts.” He also sported a grin of friendly infectious cheese, festooned by defensive foliage. Characterisations less richly comic, but often authoritative and amusing, came from Roger White and Betzie Parker. Miss Parker blew : some lovely verbal balloons ( straight out of the Bronx and pulled the strings of her marionette. Ellen Manville, quite , fetchingly; she also brought glamour to a second act which sails rather too close to the winds of Broadway. But the windmillish sway and

movement of her arms sometimes detracted from clean execution of the comedy. And while he did very well as the acrobat and poet of the voluptuous cliche, Roger White’s energetic playing of Milt Manville was too strained to be fully effective. As might have been expected the dog, “Luv,” all but stole the show. The season will end on Saturday. —M. G.T.