High Imp Quotient

Beyond the Fringe. There is a kind of gentleman's agreement, valid for many Broadway shows, that brains as well as cigarettes must be extinguished in the outer lobby, but once in a while this agreement is violated. Players and audience offer one another mutual respect, and there is an explosion of literate joy. Beyond the Fringe is precisely that.

It is written and performed by four Oxford-and Cambridge-educated Britons in their 20s, a quartet of high-IQ imps. Physically and intellectually these scholar-clowns could stock an eclectic aviary. Alan Bennett, a blond horn-rimmed owl, lectures on medieval history at Oxford. Jonathan Miller, who looks like an elongated ostrich and seems to be acrobattling his way through an imaginary soccer game, is a neuropathologist. Peter Cook, an unblinkingly phlegmatic penguin in tweeds, is a writer and editor. And Dudley Moore, who nestles like a pouter pigeon at the piano, is a musicologist, equally adept at organ and harpsichord.

Essentially, this foursome does not slaughter sacred cows but slyly milks them for irreverent merriment. The irreverence extends to God, Shakespeare, Harold Macmillan, nuclear defense, bombs A-through-H. international relations, race relations, the Battle of Britain, the royal family, hale and hollow clergymen, logical positivism, concert singers and pianists, capital punishment, and buyers of pornographic books. British dithering and deadpanning account for as many laughs in these skits as the lines themselves, but plenty of verbal darts fly.

In satire, inflation deflates, and the Fringe troupe uses this tactic brilliantly in a parody of Shakespeare's chronicle plays. After a nonsensically high-flown prologue, the nobles swagger on in giddily foppish hat creations, and promptly get flummoxed in the Bard's hopelessly entangling military alliances:

Get thee to Gloucester, Essex. Do you to Wessex, Exeter,

Fair Sussex, get you to Warwicksbourne,

And there, with frowning purpose, tell our plan

To Bedford's tilted ear . . .

The smoke of battle billows onstage, blanketing the assembled military might of two or three amateur swordsmen, and the first eight rows of the orchestra. In a hilariously interminable death scene, Jonathan Miller ricochets around and around the stage in the manner of a man alternately caught in a revolving door and staggering blind drunk out of a bar. Finally he expires, with a line that promises to become deathless. "Now is steel 'twixt gut and bladder interposed." His adversary asks the rhetorical question most often put to Shakespearean corpses: "Oh saucy Worcester, dost thou lie so still?''

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