LONDON STAGE: FOSSILS AND FERMENT

THE London stage mirrors the transatlantic crisis in theater. Appraising current English offerings, TIME'S drama critic T. E. Kalem finds that established playwrights are mute or faltering, while younger talents fail to fulfill their promise. There is a constant tremor of faddish experiments, but no significant explosion of creative energy. The measure of how much is expected of the stage is that everyone complains.

John Osborne, who initiated the modern English theatrical renaissance with Look Back in Anger, threatens to end it. His two new plays, Time Present and The Hotel in Amsterdam, are sad, sour, personal--and curiously oblique and lethargic. Osborne has never been much of a plot shaper, relying instead on arias of invective and hysteria. He is as much at the mercy of his voice as an operatic diva. This time his voice is overheard rather than heard. Instead of hurling anathemas, he bitches cattily. Instead of scalding, he scolds.

Joyless Round. Osborne began his career in fury at a social structure that seemed to bar men like him from wealth, privilege and social status. He now sounds like a Tory arriviste for whom all the champagne has proved to be flat. Both plays focus on the narcissistic aristocrats of theater and film.

These are people who have achieved everything except their hearts' desires. They are caught in the joyless round of choosing the top hotel to stay at, the finest restaurant to dine in, the most delectable partner to sleep with. Boredom infects their days and nights, and drink is their anodyne.

They occupy limbo, so nothing really happens. Time Present is monopolized by Pamela (Jill Bennett), an unemployed actress who swigs champagne and keeps a deathwatch on the only man she seems ever to have adored, her actor father. Pamela carps about everything from Americans to taxes to pop art, saving her choicest vitriol for a rival actress she calls "Lady Tinker-Bell" and whom she dismisses as "that blowtorch Mary Pickford." (Played by Kika Markham, she looks more like a striking diminutive version of Vanessa Redgrave.) The role of Pamela is demanding and singularly graceless, but Jill Bennett (the offstage Mrs. Osborne) is singularly graceful, grave, bruised, disenchanted.

The Hotel in Amsterdam is more of the same, leavened with more humor. This time the Osborne spokesman is a caustic writer named Laurie (Paul Sco-field). Laurie, his wife, and two other married couples form the immediate entourage of a "dinosaur" of a film producer called K.L. They have fled their employer for a secret respite in Amsterdam, but they spend most of the evening talking about him and one another. Apart from the intramural shoptalk, the chitchat goes something like this. Dan: "Have you ever thought of airlines for homosexuals?" Laurie: "I say: what a splendid idea. You could call it El Fag Airlines."

Drame `a Clef. Osborne uses the occasion to contrast the manipulative vampirism of the producer with the task and plight of the writer. At play's end, the band of esthetic fugitives receive word that their boss has committed suicide. Some English reviewers have interpreted the play as a drame a clef--Osborne's public vendetta with Producer-Director Tony Richardson after a recent bitter breakup of their long working relationship. Ordinary audiences, however, can hardly be expected to make sense of arcane theatrical gossip.

Still, there is a certain substance behind this elusive shadow play. Osborne has drawn a portrait of the artist in a middle-aged funk, a prey to the 5 a.m. hoo-ha's, chronically in pain, unappeasably romantic, listening in self-pity and dread to time's metronome ticking away with deadly austerity. Paul Scofield profiles Laurie with meticulous care, but he cannot quite manage that sudden, sneering, swooping descent into vulgarity that Osborne demands. When Scofield has to talk about some woman giving "the golden sanitary towel award," he seems to be holding the line out at arm's length between a fastidious thumb and forefinger.

A young playwright of widely hailed promise, Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) is tick-tocking away with deadly superficiality in his new play, The Real Inspector Hound. This is a double-edged spoof on mystery plays and drama critics.

One critic is an avid lecher and blurb-confectioner, the other an intellectual exegete who would ponder the "human condition" in a pile of burning rubbish. Just such rubbish is put before both men in a fatuous mystery play. In a way, Hound is a miniaturized travesty of R. and G., since the two critics cannot grasp the play they are watching any better than R. and G. could fathom Hamlet. The critics become unintentionally involved in the action and are both shot to death. Stoppard is a ' word mimic and a born parodist. But parody is parasitic and needs a strong host body. With Hamlet as host, Stoppard worked wonders. Apart from a few antic moments, The Real Inspector Hound is a lazy blunder.

Agile Intellect. On both shores of the Atlantic, new ideas seem to have deserted playwrights to lodge with directors. Of these, Peter Brook, a man of agile intellect and strong disciplinary instincts, is incomparably the most influential. He may be more of a comet than a planet, but currently light follows wherever he streaks. His Marat/ Sade, with its writhing choreographic movement and untrammeled vocabulary of sound, was the first step toward a revolution in drama: making the theater a director's medium.

According to the theater's constitution, power has been divided more or less equally among playwright, actor and director. Brook has altered that drastically. He has lowered the visibility of the actor, by making him much more of a group figure, an inter-actor--the difference, as it were, between Greek sculpture and Egyptian bas-relief. Similarly, the playwright in Brook's hands has been reduced to a sort of coauthor. Brook supplies, or imposes, a coeval text of ritualistic sounds and gestures that often competes with the playwright's lines. At its worst, this method generates intensity without illumination. At its best, it taps sources of visceral theatrical vitality.

The Brook approach works superbly in his production of Seneca's Oedipus at the Old Vic. The play begins on a pitch of sound, an eerie, ominous ululation as of a sullen hurricane of bees.

Throughout the evening, the chorus is an orchestra of destiny, hissing like asps, palm-slapping boxes as if they were African gourds, and knifing the air with karate chops--all without severing the narrative cord of the tragedy. Seneca uses the same legend as Sophocles, but the texture is quite different: cruder, more explicit, an operatic engorgement of rant and rhetoric. Sex and violence have never been more seamlessly knit in a single myth. Despite the filter of Roman stoicism, this vision of fatality is essentially Greek. Brook makes it highly accessible to contemporary audiences. They have a nagging suspicion that they live in a world that seems to defy rationality, resist comprehension, and smother the individual will with catastrophes that resemble elemental disasters of nature.

Golden Cube. The stage is dominated by a single glittering image of man's boxed-in state, a golden cube that opens and closes on the key figures, serving as both podium and prison. Ill at ease with the play and his role, John Gielgud plays Oedipus as if he were Richard II slumming in Hell. By contrast, Irene Worth is marvelously regal as Jocasta, especially in one memorable scene of horror as she impales herself on a trihedron as if to mortify her treacherous womb. Her mouth arcs open in the fixed, remorseless agony of the tragic mask.

In an experimental production of The Tempest Brook becomes so infatuated with the dramatic punctuation of sound and stance that he lapses into incoherence. But his most difficult problem is not of his own making. Ever since Marat/ Sade, he has striven for a theater that would chill the groin, terrify, mystify and purify--a theater of mythic dimensions, a theater of ritual. But there are no religious convictions in contemporary society to sustain such a theater. No priest can invest wafers and wine with awe unless they are held to be the body and blood of Christ. Ritual without religion is merely gesture. This is what thwarts Brook in his efforts to revivify the theater.

Coffeehouse Culture. Otherwise, the London stage today offers more in the way of diversion than dimension. This is the year that off-off Broadway came to London. The coffeehouse culture, with its neophyte playwrights and experimental troupes, seems to be invading every vacant cellar and abandoned warehouse. In these settings, theater is less of an art form than life style. The leading impresarios of these latter-day catacombs are transplanted Americans --Charles Marowitz, Ed Berman and Jim Haynes--and they share the fervor of early Christians while espousing neopaganism. They want to extend the latitude of subject master and erase the distance between actor and audience.

The vogue of the hour is participatory theater with an erotic bias.

The heraldic sign of these enterprises is the nude. On one level the nude is a modish free-spirit manifesto of the '60s, the same kind of statement a 1920s flapper made by smoking a cigarette. A more serious rationale is offered by the director Jerzy Grotowski, a prominent

Polish avant-gardist. Grotowski argues that theater exists to shatter taboos that separate man from himself. The relentless iconoclasm of the age has pretty much destroyed religious, political and social taboos. According to Grotowski, only the human body retains an aura of sanctity that lends itself to exposure, shock and outrage.

A Leaf for the Patron. One striking example is the sort of drama presented by Berman, 26, a kinetic, spade-bearded expatriate from Maine. Devoted to what he calls "the Theater of Eros," he is at work on a six-playlet cycle under the collective title of Kiss My .... He believes that drama should be made accessible to people within their daily living patterns. Accordingly, his latest one-acter, The Nudist Campers Grow and Grow, goes on at Cafe Ambiance at lunch hour. Each patron is given a tree leaf if he cares to join the nude campers. A few have.

On a postage-stamp stage, a man and a woman appear, wearing only card board and painted fig leaves. The woman also wears a black rubber bra with red rims designed to resemble huge sunglasses. What follows is verbal love play and a kind of spoofy striptease in which the twosome gingerly play on the supposed skittishness of the audience. After a mock wedding ceremony in front of a barber pole ("Do you, Pandy, take this girl Mandy, because she is randy?"), a climactic libation scene occurs. Pandy and Mandy put on green mitts the size of baseball gloves and sponge each other off, resulting in the outre spectacle of streaky green pubic hair.

At play's end, a man and a woman--who have seemed to be members of the audience--sedately remove all their clothes and saunter behind the curtain at the rear of the stage. After one performance, the woman came up for a snack in the cafe restaurant.

"Brave girl!" said her chum. That almost defines it. All the tension, inhibitory release and involvement are reserved for the cast. For the spectator, a nude is a nude is a nude. Dramatically, nudes will never mean much in the theater until they do something.

The Nudist Campers evokes the critical judgment rendered by Martin Esslin, author of The Theater of the Absurd, that "the modern theater aspires to the condition of the brothel, but it cannot deliver the goods." At Jim Haynes' Arts Laboratory, every night is an esthetic Mardi Gras, and one obsessive concern of the "artists" is to make expressive art objects of themselves. They are human happenings, and as such may spell the death of art rather than its birth. For them, durability seems like death. Their credo is not "Life is short. Art is long" but "Life is short. Art is shorter." Sibylline Utterances. To move from the coffeehouses to an Old Vic revival of The Three Sisters is like catapulting through time. The production is exquisitely mounted, the acting impeccable. Joan Plowright makes Masha a woman of neurotically vulnerable ardor, and as her lover Vershinin, Robert Stephens is a colonel of spineless charm. And yet by comparison, the new experiments in theater make the play seem greyer, dustier, more sibylline than it used to be--as if the sisters' failure to get to Moscow were paralleled by the play's inability to reach the contemporary sensibility.

The modern theater, whether in London or New York, dwells in this half-light, with its pensive mixture of not-yet-dusk and not-quite-dawn. Since drama does not spin on nature's axis but on man's art, the pallid half-light may be prolonged. In few ages has the theater dazzled, yet through how many has it endured.

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