No Uncle Ray

Ottawans got to know William Congreve a little better. Two nights in a row last week, John Gielgud's company presented the Restoration dramatist's Love for Love at the Capitol Theater. Halfway through the first act, two clergymen in the first-night audience got up and walked out. (Asked a member of the cast next day: "But surely they knew what they were coming to see, didn't they?") The Ottawa Journal called it "the sexiest, bawdiest and most outspoken comedy-drama that ever unfolded publicly on an Ottawa stage."* Said the Ottawa Citizen more mildly: ". . . One can only remind readers that Congreve is not Uncle Ray [Citizen children's columnist]."

The second night there were lines at the box office and nobody walked out.

*The Journal's strong words were not the first. Two hundred and forty-nine years ago, in a broadside entitled A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, an eminent churchman, the Rev. Jeremy Collier inveighed against the hero of Love for Love: "He is a prodigal debauchee, unnatural, and profane, obscene, saucy, and undutiful; and yet this libertine is crowned for the man of merit, has his wishes thrown into his lap. . . ." Congreve replied nervously, and not altogether convincingly, that he was doing a useful social work in painting "the vices and follies of human kind."

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