Down with Blimpcompoops

How's the World Treating You? by Roger Milner. With the rage and frustration of so many Samsons, British playwrights after Suez began bringing down England's temples of hypocrisy, pomposity, caste and class snobbery. Then anger turned to almost hysterical laughter: the acerb mocking tone one hears and the swinging London air one breathes in plays like Entertaining Mr. Sloane, A Severed Head, The Killing of Sister George, Eh?, and such Pinter one-acters as The Lover, A Slight Ache and The Collection. The latest comedy to rip the stuffing out of the stuffy is How's the World Treating You?, and it is desolatingly funny.

The three acts divide into surrealistic vaudeville episodes in the life of an anti-hero at ages 22, 32 and 42. In Act I, Lieut. Frank More (James Bolam) reports at a demobilization center sans troops or trousers. The colonel (Peter Bayliss) doesn't notice, since he is a total Blimpcompoop. He does notice that the peanuts are missing at the officers' bar, and he raises unprintable hell. World regularly mocks British dead-face understatement about things that count v. British redneck rage over trifles. Bayliss does a kind of tonsillectomy of his part. He wheezes, bleeps, snorts, and plays endless comic tunes on his catarrh. He is like an animated poster propagandizing the inanity, silliness and stupidity of the military.

Act II finds More at a coming-out party. He is a history teacher, and the debutante is a 16-year-old pupil of his, seven months pregnant by him. It is virtually impossible to get this fact and More's marriage proposal across to the girl's brain-drained upper-class parents. Mother (Patricia Routledge) has her dress on backward so that it can be seen better when she is dancing, and her hair seems to be on backward too. When Father (Bayliss) grasps the bad news, he trots to the phone and demands a tuition refund, refusing to enter his daughter in the school's maternity wing.

By Act III, More's marriage is on the rocks. Having turned washing-machine salesman and failed, he has been taken to a refuge called Suicide Sanctuary. The sanctuary is run by a do-good nut (Bayliss again). As his wife and helper, Patricia Routledge hops around like a kangaroo whose pouch has just been rifled. Her name is Rover, and she has an imaginary dog named Maureen. "I hate the whole beastly business," says More. "The competition, the rat race." Replies Bayliss, in a tone typical of the play: "You mustn't hate the rat race. The human race, yes--but not animals."

Bayliss and Routledge are insuperable zanies who volley words and antics with the pinging precision of a finals match at Wimbledon. Playwright Milner is an agile mind behind the madness.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.