Games Playwrights Play

Life may be a game, but not all games are lifelike. This basic distinction makes all the difference in two plays that recently opened in London, and whose authors are twin brothers with varying philosophies of gamesmanship. One brother has produced a work that is sheer play, the other a play that labors but does not work.

Peter Shaffer, whose succes de spectacle was The Royal Hunt of the Sun, plays a labored game of "hound the humanist" in The Battle of Shrivings. Sir Gideon Petrie (John Gielgud) is an aged, Bertrand Russell-like champion of rationalism living ascetically at Shrivings, a converted medieval abbey in the Cotswold Hills. From there he guides a peace movement and blandly preaches the perfectibility of human nature to youthful acolytes and to his wife (Wendy Hiller), with whom he renounced sex, on principle, at the age of 40.

In every sense, Sir Gideon's house seems to be in order. Actually, it is so much philosophic straw, waiting to be huffed and puffed down by Mark Askelon (Patrick Magee), a renegade poet drenched in whisky and despair. Askelon, a onetime disciple of Sir Gideon's, arrives at Shrivings to seek his lost faith through a mordant challenge to the old man's sweet reasonableness: If Askelon is given license to spend a weekend attacking Shrivings and everyone in it, will Sir Gideon's beliefs enable him to forbear, or will he be stung into betraying those beliefs by violently ejecting Askelon?

Shaw Without Shaw. The challenge is fascinating, but Sir Gideon courts disaster in accepting it. So does Playwright Shaffer. Shrivings is a Shaw play without Shaw. Where the master could have whirled the philosopher to triumph in a blaze of intellectual toughness and passion, Shaffer slips the poet the victory with too little of either. In the end, Sir Gideon is forced to throw out everything except Askelon in a battle that is not so much pitched as rigged. Gielgud lends the part a tremulous, blinking dignity, but he can only play it the way Shaffer wrote it: as the milquetoast of human kindness. Like the devil, the devil's advocate has all the best lines, even if many of them are overwrought and overwrit. It is Magee's poet--haranguing, seducing, at once flailing out with and wincing from his own lash--who jolts the play occasionally into the corrosive credibility it ought to sustain throughout.

Credibility does not really count in Sleufh, by Anthony Shaffer, a television and movie writer who has sometimes collaborated with Brother Peter on detective novels. Sleuth reflects no real world, only the glints of its own inner harmonies. It is all a diabolical plot, and the first to be overthrown by it are the reviewers, for there is no way to describe it without giving away its secrets. It can only be said that its protagonist, a successful whodunit writer named Andrew Wyke (Anthony Quayle), is a witty snob who is inwardly delighted when a would-be lover makes a bid to divest him of his burdensome wife. Wyke sets out to ensnare his apparent dupe (Keith Baxter) in his own obsession with masks, disguises and charades, and, of course, is himself ensnared.

Taut and literate as Shaffer's entertainment is, it could have been merely another of those theatrical arabesques that fade as quickly as the footlights. Two things redeem it from such slickness. The stylish gusto of Baxter and especially of Quayle give the whole performance an edge that could cut glass. Moreover, Shaffer manages deftly to satirize the detective genre at the same time that he constructs a classic model of it. His satire brings out a hint of desperation behind the characters' capering. Ultimately his sport is directed against the games-playing mentality itself, with its retreat from sprawling life into the artificial order that detective stories provide.

If Peter Shaffer's reach exceeds his grasp in Shrivings, Anthony Shaffer's grasp is so sure in Sleuth that the playgoer may well wish he had reached farther. In fact, it is tempting to find a moral in this--but drawing morals can be too facile a game.

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