Love Antic & Frantic

The Private Ear and The Public Eye, by Peter Shaffer. Light entertainment is a promise the theater is quick to make and slow to honor. In these two one-acters, the promise is entrancingly kept. They defy the laws of mental gravity and lift a playgoer out of his world only to see it better, just as a dream is sometimes truer than a thought.

The Public Eye has the edge in freshness and invention. Mr. Cristoforou (Barry Foster) materializes in an austerely elegant London office lined with muted leather bindings. Against this background, Cristoforou is a sartorial explosion of black and brown stripes, flaming yellow tie, a cafe-au-lait shirt, off-beige shoes, and foreign correspondent's raincoat. He is also a walking menu of odd goodies. Out of his pockets and briefcase, he dredges and devours bananas, Brazil nuts, cartons of yoghurt and handfuls of macaroons, while flourishing an empty sugarcellar. A Greek by descent, and a private detective by happenstance, Cristoforou spends his life shadowing joy. He is the most antic and mythic embodiment of the Life Force since Zorba the Greek danced off the pages of the Nikos Kazantzakis novel.

This bizarre detective's job is to follow the wife of a stuffy intellectual accountant who suspects his spouse of being unfaithful. She is a jazzy emotional urchin less than half her husband's age. Their teacher-pupil marriage is threatened with a permanent recess. Peripatetic Philosopher Cristoforou teaches them the saving lesson that love in marriage is content rather than form, the sharing of experience rather than the bandying of words.

As the husband and wife, Moray Watson and Geraldine McEwan strike precise discords. Barry Foster's vibrant Cristoforou is a more remarkable and indefinable creation, a Pan in spiv's clothing sounding pipes of pleasure that carry a lingering echo from ancient pagan groves.

The Private Ear relies more on memory than magic, what playgoers remember and rue about their own first stumbling, infatuated steps toward love. "Tchaik" (Brian Bedford), a whimsically imaginative boy nicknamed for Tchaikovsky, is pathetically in earnest about classical music and a quality called "inner beauty" that is symbolized for him in a reproduction of Botticelli's Venus over his bed. With fear and trembling, plus a savvy pal's coaching, he has invited to his scrubby flat what he thinks is a feminine moonlight sonata. Enter the girl (Geraldine McEwan), a sniffly, scratchy, giggly chick with the inner beauty of a beer can. She is not smitten with Benjamin Britten. The pal gets Tchaik's girl without half trying. Brian Bedford gives love's labor lost a touchingly bewildered pathos, but despite its technical adroitness, The Private Ear seldom breaks free of the anticlimactic art of the expected.

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