Celluloid-Spliced Lovers

By T.E.K.

What can you say about a brilliant medieval philosopher-theologian, 37 and virginal, who falls in love with his aptest pupil, the 17-year-old niece of a canon of Notre Dame, has a child by her, marries her and then is castrated by the hired thugs of the irate and possibly incestuous-minded uncle? After all that, Abelard and Heloise live in undying love in separate cloisters. Erich Segal, meet Playwright Ronald Millar, your British opposite number.

No one can really determine whether Love Story has saturated the lovestory market. If not, Abelard & Heloise may glow at the box office despite its sallow dramatic complexion. "Inspired" by Helen Waddell's novel Peter Abelard, and the love letters of Heloise and Abelard, the play actually belongs in the company of operettas, historical romances and three-handkerchief movies. Critical duty virtually stops there; the people who like this sort of thing do so invariably, and the people who don't, don't.

Diana Rigg as Heloise and Keith Michell as Abelard are lovers not so much star-crossed as celluloid-spliced. A playgoer might even feel that he was watching an ad trailer from the film-to-be. Thrill to A & H in a nude scene played in one-watt lighting. Chill as A is symbolically castrated by some sinister leprechauns left over from a ballet of yesteryear. Hiss the uncle. Chortle with a tipsy canon (Ronald Radd) and a tipsier abbess (Jacqueline Brookes). So much for medieval color. In dialogue. Playwright Millar has spared his audience the one line that the show subliminally calls to mind: "This thing is bigger than both of us." The lines that are heard call for the violin sobs of a swelling sound track: "It's indescribable --it's as if we invented a new emotion." Even music might not salvage lines like "These masculine codes, Peter, they have no meaning for a woman," or Abelard bemoaning the secrecy of their marriage: "It shouldn't be like this. All the bells should ring for us!"

These are words from the man who flashed across 12th century Europe like a fiery intellectual comet. Keith Michell has a certain craggy charm, but the stuff of genius has not been written into his part, nor the anguishing ardor of his choice between his vows and his passion. Diana Rigg succeeds rather better, though she lacks vulnerability. There is a gritty, voracious sensuousness about her that finally makes it clear she has found and lost in this man the only god she could ever bring herself to worship. . T.E.K.

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