Dancing in the Dark

Black Comedy by Peter Shaffer is an unflaggingly funny drawing-room farce based on a single droll conceit: what might people do and say and discover about each other if they were suddenly left in a total blackout on the evening of a vitally important party? To begin with, this poses a little problem of stagecraft: How do you present actors in the dark and still allow the audience to see them? Simple: by reversing things. When the lights are supposed to be on, the stage is dark; when they are suddenly supposed to go out, the stage blazes with light.

The spectators can now see, but the actors are meant to be in sightless confusion, playing blindman's buff. They begin a convulsively amusing, slow-motion night dance of straight-arming the air, pawing and fumbling for objects and people, mistaking identities, and trading unintended indiscretions under the misleading cover of darkness.

The frantic hero (Michael Crawford) is the kind of artist who fashions metallic sculptures that look as if they were conceived during a tin famine. Engaged to a very U deb (Lynn Redgrave), he is about to meet her very pukka sahib army colonel father (Peter Bull). Also expected is a millionaire art fancier with a notorious avidity for avant-garde junk. To impress the guests, Crawford and Redgrave have carted off the sculptor's jackdaw furniture and replaced it with elegant antiques "borrowed" from the neighboring apartment of an exquisitely gay bachelor (Donald Madden) supposedly away for the weekend.

Of course, the bachelor unexpectedly shows up during the blackout, and one of the flit-and-run sight gags of the evening is Crawford's desperately adroit and maladroit effort to sneak the antiques back to the rightful owner's flat. By the time that Crawford's mistress (Geraldine Page) makes her unseen appearance, it is clear that British Playwright Shaffer has skimmed the most risibility from invisibility since the old Topper films.

Black Comedy's monkeyshines are brought to a high polish by an acrobatically agile cast, but the players might have been spared some arm-and-leg-work if Playwright Shaffer had pared the show and tightened the pace. Choosing to be optically antic, he evades the opportunity to show how the eye lies and the mind's eye ferrets out reality --which might have given the evening more intellectual relish, a sort of Pirandello flavor. In a one-act opener called White Lies, Shaffer tries to be wise rather than clever about lovers and lovelessness. As an impoverished fortuneteller, Geraldine Page performs with feline grace, but Shaffer's dramatic crystal ball is murky. Fortunately, the evening is redeemed by Black Comedy's dancing waves of mirth.

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