More English Than the English?

They had spent the evening among sharpies and shills and slick-talking swindlers dedicated to the ancient shopkeeper's art of conning the customer. But London's theater critics were delighted. When it opened in the West End last week, Wolf Mankowitz' brash, breezy new comedy, Make Me An Offer, rang up just the sort of sale the playwright was bargaining for. "When the British musical finally finds its feet," said the staid Financial Times, "we may well remember Make Me An Offer as a landmark on the way."

Mankowitz' affectionate attack on the cheerfully amoral operators who are London's buccaneers of bric-a-brac, the antique dealers of Portobello Road, sparkled with the vitality of the underworld he has taken for his own. "One specializes in the people nearest one's personal archetype," says Author Mankowitz, "dealers, agents, toughies, whores, pimps, gamblers, all freelances like myself--people who work in a metier, vestiges of primitive capitalism. These are my people."

Poacher & Pro. At 35, Mankowitz has already put his characters into novels (Old Soldiers Never Die, A Kid for Two Farthings) and movies (The Bespoke Overcoat, Expresso Bongo). He has turned them loose in plays, short stories, poems, TV shows and news stories. He also finds time to serve as a successful theater and TV producer, a TV panelist, an internationally respected authority on Wedgwood china (he is co-owner of London's largest china shop), and he is the author of three books on pottery. "The theater," says Mankowitz. "is fair game. I reserve the right to poach on anyone's preserves."

Mankowitz has exercised his self-reserved right so often that today he is less poacher than pro. Son of an East End trader who taught him that "the only good deal is one that shows everyone a profit," Cambridge-educated Wolf Mankowitz has made a good deal indeed for the British theater. He has brought it a bubbling British enthusiasm that pays off at the box office whether his shows are being polished in Director Joan Littlewood's East End Theater Royal or bargaining for big money on the other side of town. Even in the West End his productions are usually low budget. "Good characters don't cost you any more to create," he argues. "Good lines don't cost any more. Heart doesn't cost any more."

Flesh & Abstractions. Along with his other activities, Mankowitz' stage successes have brought him a handsome St. John's Wood house in London and an eight-acre, 16th century manor in Kent. His real rewards, says he, are to have achieved "independence, privacy and space." Despite such serene surroundings, he insists, "I have more in common with any other freelance, from a prostitute to a delicatessen owner, than the stiff, abstract tedious people from the literary world."

His contemporaries, sneers Mankowitz, "write about nice, happy, sexless people who lead nice, happy, sexless lives." "As for me," says he, "I love the flesh. I like to catch people at it. I love the culture that proceeds out of the physical life of people; people as they are, without snobbery or pretensions. I'm a Jew from Russia who was born in this country," he adds. "But I'm more English than the English have been for 100 years."

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