Sex as a Trinomial Theorem

The Complaisant Lover (by Graham Greene) contends that love and marriage do not mix, but that husbands and lovers can be good mixers. The husband in this diverting trinomial theorem is a dentist (Michael Redgrave) who has drifted out of the sex habit. The lover (Richard Johnson) is a bookshop owner who collects other men's wives like first editions. The wife (Googie Withers) is a happy mother of two who embarks on an illicit affair with the booksy chap to balance her emotional diet.

The lover turns jealously possessive and deliberately tips off the husband. Instead of suing for divorce, the dentist breaks into sobs. Touchingly needful of his wife, who refuses to choose between the two men, the dentist puts an unconventional proposal to the lover: a kind of manger `a trois, dinner together every week plus adulterous vacation privileges during dentists' conventions. To the wife's almost indecent glow of relief, the outmaneuvered lover agrees to play odd man in.

To those who relish Novelist and Playwright Graham Greene most when he broods over the eternal triangle--man, guilt and God--The Complaisant Lover will be a qualified disappointment. There is not a guilt-edged line or character in the play. On its own frothy comedy terms, it is a qualified success. Like most British drawing-room comedies, Lover is so well-bred as to seem overbred emotionally. The talk is good, but at times one also wishes it was either straighter or cleverer. While the plot is more piquant than the dialogue, a fine cast is more totally convincing than the plot.

Michael Redgrave's skillfully modulated performance unfolds a role to lay bare a man. In the early scenes, he is a British Babbitt, about as funny as a dentist's drill as he plays painful jokes with musical seat cushions and leaky glasses to the lonely giggle-gurgle of his own laughter. When he learns of his cuckolding, his face looks as deserted as a broken window. Fetching Googie Withers has eyes that flicker with the reflected firelight of romance, and her voice is a stolen kiss. As a kind of reformed cad, Richard Johnson is worldly wise without being world-weary.

Playwright Greene astutely observes how the small talk of the married about cookery and child care ''kills desire," wryly noting that "only kindness grows in that soil." Indeed, the lovers are amusingly disarmed by domestic kindness when the wife promises to tell her husband about her lover, "but not before Christmas.'' There is a scandalously funny how-he-caught-her-with-the-other-man scene, in which the dentist blandly fails to catch on, that takes place in an Amsterdam hotel room on and around twin brass beds, and the triangle is augmented by a Dutch dental supply manufacturer and a bellhop translator. What follows is a kind of bilingual What's My Line? panel quiz that all by itself makes the evening worth its comic weight in inflated Broadway pennies.

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