Duet of Dynasts

By T.E. Kalem

Future generations will undoubtedly look back on the '50s, '60s and emerging 70s as a golden age of British acting. The mature actors--Olivier, Scofield, Gielgud, Richardson and Redgrave --ripened from talent to mastery to greatness. Like dynastic sires, they have inspired an exciting group of young successors--Albert Finney, Nicol Williamson, Ian McClellan, Tom Courtenay --actors less attuned to the niceties of craft, but ablaze with Elizabethan intensity. In Home, the U.S. debut of an extremely evocative new British playwright, David Storey, there is an opportunity to view a feat of artistry by Richardson and Gielgud that becomes legendary before one's eyes.

The action, and there is virtually none, for this is a Chekhovian mood piece, takes place in a mental home. There are no acute aberrations. The place is no nuttier than the world, or life. Richardson and Gielgud are two men who stand on the crumbling threshold of old age, all passion spent, memories distant but present, vivid yet garbled. For them, every dawn is dusk, and every dusk is darkened with the knowledge of imminent death.

With quiet desperation, they are living out a horror story, the seventh age of man. It is strikingly like the first age. They chat a lot, but it is much like babies' babble, unfinished, noncom-municative. They tire easily and plop down like small children at the first available resting place. Mealtime is the pinnacle of the day. In between, they conduct a kind of innocuous sandbox flirtation, brief as a toddler's attention span, with two women inmates, Dandy Nichols and Mona Washbourne, one of whom has a reputation for wetting herself. At odd, unprovoked moments, each man cries over his condition and we, in the audience, cry over ours, which is a short definition of tragedy.

The Dandy and the Tradesman. Elegiac, autumnal and melancholy though it is, Home is shot through with rueful humor. Playwright Storey subtly draws an ironic parallel between the plight of the two men and the fate of England. The word island recurs: England shorn of empire, reduced to her physical boundaries, but with names and deeds of the past intoned like a faint requiem of glory--Newton, and Sir Walter Raleigh and the discovery of penicillin. The sceptered isle has become a gleamless cinder on the tides of history.

The play is laced with laconic, seemingly perfunctory responses such as "Oh, yes," "Ah, well," "Really?" but Director Lindsay Anderson has orchestrated these in a stylized contrapuntal flow that achieves the repetitive impact of similarly sparse dialogue in Pinter and Beckett. Gielgud and Richardson are a beautifully complementary pair, the dandy and the tradesman, Gielgud's elevated clarinet tones v. Richardson's deeper bassoon. When Gielgud narrows his eyes he seems to be glimpsing the Elysian Fields; when Richardson widens his, he seems to be devouring a plate of sausages. Gielgud has a troubled introspective psyche; Richardson tries to rout his spooks with an anecdotal army of distant relatives. In sum, they create something more haunting than their individual parts. Just before Home's curtain falls, the two men stand apart to the right and left of the stage. In a vise of silence, they gaze sightlessly out at the ever-dimming light. That moment forms an ineradicably poignant image of man's homeless end.

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