A bit of the other

Press, 5 August 1980, Page 15

A bit of the other

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John Collins

| The sinking-lid policy lion staffing levels took ef,'fect on television drama on Sunday evening in a Harold Pinter play on Network One in which a married couple had afternoon lovers who were themselves acting out fantasies.

An austere and conventional businessman, played stiffly by Patrick Allen, left for work in bowler and sober suit in the morning and returned in the afternoon in sunglasses and playboy suedes to dally behind his own back with his wife. ’The wife, played in an even more Noel Coward manner by Vivien Merchant, was waiting, teetering on stiletto heels and squeezed, most, of her anyway, into the traditional black seduction togs, to lure him away from herself if only for a while. The seduction involved a progression of character assumptions, beginning with a street encounter in the dining room, a flirtation with an imagined park-keeper in the kitchen, an erotic encounter over a bongo drum, and finally muffled gasps and squeaks from under the dining table. Domestic bliss. That such a range of characters could be accomplished by two actors was most impressive at a 'time when television needs -to cut back on unnecessary expenditure. After this one must greet with enthusiasm the news that Pinter is to rewrite “The Rise and Fall of the

Roman Empire” as a dramatic monologue. Both the cast delivered their lines with the echoing flatness developed by Coward himself and adopted in recent years by Roger Moore, with the result that their interaction managed for the first twothirds of the play to be simultaneously totally absorbing and absolutely unconvincing. This is precisely what Pinter is unrivalled at: line after line of the dialogue fell on the ear as exact and clever representations of the way people speak, but none of it added up to anything resembling a conversation. But . gradually, “The Lover” went beyond being more than an extremely clever dramatic game. Towards the end the husband began to tire of his tolerance of his afternoon visits as the lover, and forbade his wife to see him. Since the wife, as the whore, had already had a barney with him as the lover in the afternoon, things began to look dark. Pintery menace all over the screen.

The husband seemed on the verge • of murdering wife in a jealous rage,

fighting himselt in some sort of Monty Python duel in outrage at hie betrayal behind his own back, or, at least, shredding the fantasies that tad held the odd marriage together. Insanity prevailed, and it was squeaks and gasps under the table again. Earlier, in ’ “Life on Earth” (One), David Attenborough continue 1 to act as toastmaster for the nonstop meal that seems to. make up the life of mammals. Far from the bewitching Technicolor (copyright) u..dulations of the sea bed creatures of a month or so ago, mammals see . to spend their time crunching up squi-shy-looking things in close-up. When not exhibiiting their revolting eating habits, they are usually to be found dropping unpalatable and moist pink offspring from unattractive orifices. Give me the striped flatworm any day. Bats, shown blasting across the s: men like psychotic and crippled umbrellas, must be among the most revolting eaters in close-up since Robert Morley did his chat at dinner with Michael Deane years ago. Much more acceptable, though still reminiscent of Morley, were the whales.

Attenborough was shown dangling a microphone into the Pacific and picking up strained and plaintive noises from whales whose location was unknown. Pinter fans could have known to look for them under the dining table.