Poor Percy

Rattle of a Simple Man, by Charles Dyer. Percy is a Manchester clerk who has been almost immunized against sex by devotion to "moovies," to darts with the "jolly laads," to everlasting "wurrrk," and most of all to "Mum." But a beery night's fling in London puts him within communicable range of the dread disease. Cyrenne is a nightclub tart with eyes as impersonal as jelly beans, and a tendency to strip to a small black egg-cup bra in the twinkling of a false eyelash. The question of the evening: Will the parochial bumpkin, who admits to being 35 and is really 42, lose his virginity to the big-city floozy?

Theatrically, the situation seems almost as old as the profession. Dramatically, the problem of the prostitute with a heart of gold is not so much that she is a cliche as that she cannot ply her trade. Action is busily evaded in stage business, and the talk drifts into the confessional memoirs of two strangers who have unaccountably shot past the handshaking stage. Ultimately, the strain of staying out of bed becomes more intense than the pleasure of getting into it. Thus the play is incessantly torn between farce and pathos, and each of the two key players marks out one of these modes and acts in it with splendid isolation.

Tammy Grimes's Cyrenne is a perkily perfect farceuse, a bedroom imp continually assuming antic positions with dry-witted composure. Edward Woodward's Percy is a plebeian prince of pathos. Under his toothbrush mustache lurks a toothy nervous tic of a grin with which he commits endless facial suicides of self-doubt. He is as simple as the wooden rattle (a soccer-game noisemaker) that he carries in his hand. A mere kiss from Cyrenne makes him act like a porpoise with convulsions.

Poor Percy is the emotional fulcrum of the play, and probably says more to an English than to an American playgoer. Britain's Dyer is not an angry playwright, but he shares the current British theatrical fervor for discovering the lower classes. This social ferment is a quarter of a century out of phase with the U.S. experience of the Depression that animated the old Group Theater's concept of the hero as ultra common man. The sad truth is that the Percys of the world are the small beer of the drama, and in two hours they get awfully flat.

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