Some New Plays

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31754, 10 August 1968, Page 4

Some New Plays

The Sunday Walk. By Georges MicheL Methuen Playscript 78 pp. Home Free! and the Madness of Lady Bright By Lanford Wilson. Methuen Playscript 61 ' PP-

A Refined Look At Existence. By Rodney Milgate. Methuen Playscript with Hicks Smith. 91 PP-

A family is out on its Sunday-afternoon stroll. It is a very ordinary family with conservative values expressed in cliches. A shot is heard, and the Grandfather falls dead. The rest of the family (son, parents and grandmother) observe his death with a clinical detachment, exchange a few platitudes, and continue their walk. Two Men In Black come on stage, carry off the body, and scatter a little sawdust The walk goes on, interrupted only by the purchase of a certified best-seller, rite viewing of some policemen beating a beggar, and the murder of Grandmother. (“This really isn’t our lucky day. Some days it’s better to stay at heme.”) So they pass their afternoon, walking but carefully staying still, until the son’s death deprives them at the only outlet for their pedantry-. The theme of this play, the political and social apathy of the absurd routine, i» developed through grotesque caricature until the powerful last scene, where the reversal realises the whole action.

Lanford Wilson’s two plays are pathetic comedies about social outsiders. Lady Bright is a 40-year-old homosexual, “a screaming. preening queen, rapidly losing a longkept beauty.” It is essentially a one-character play, but he is supported by a

girl and a boy who adapt into any role required by Lady Bright’s reminiscences and whims. In “Home Free” there are two characters: a 25-year-old psychotic and his sister, pregnant by him. They are attended by a couple of imaginary doubles which are real to the man and useful for the woman. Both are one-act, one-set plays which assume highly versatile actors and sophisticated audiences. Wilson is an American, and the Methuen Playscript publication coincides with the double bill of these plays in the London Mercury Theatre. The look at existence which Rodney Milgate (an Australian) attempts to refine is that of the Greek tragedies: the first act (which could be done as a one-acter) contains the Zeus-Semele relationship, and Acts two and three are an adaptation of Euripides’s “Bacchae.” Dionysus is a young pop-singer-cum-faith-healer and Pentheus (Penthouse) a half-caste who disrupts the singer’s ritual and is pushed on to a high-voltage cable by his mother. The theme—conformity—is still the same, but whereas Euripides included this force in the character of Dionysus, Milgate uses it as an influence which controls even the pop-singer. The reduction of King Pentheus to an angry young simpleton in army dress combines with the ridiculous policemen who recite “The Laws of the Jungle” to suggest that the fault in our society is not that the young refuse to conform, but rather that our concept of ethics is not flexible enough to adjust with social development Milgate’s play includes I some well-integrated verse, i and a cautious attempt at I audience involvement