Verbal Pingpong

By T.E.K.

Picture a concert pianist of great technical skill whose fingers race across the keyboard like a riptide. Suddenly his face turns soulful, as if he were attempting to hang each note in the air like a snowflake. With a brisk, dryly ironic flourish he brings the composition to its close. But through the entire piece, the instrument has been soundless.

There you have an approximation of a newly imported British comedy, The Philanthropist. Playwright Christopher Hampton, 24, is witty, clever, debonair; he uses the English language with sly gusto and rare affection. He has given an impressive display of that affection in his fluently idiomatic adaptations of A Doll's House and Hedda Gahler in this season's off-Broadway revivals. The misfortune in his own play is that the passion, conflict and tone of voice of a playwright saying what he feels he has to say are all but inaudible.

Venus's-Flytrap. Fittingly enough, Philip (Alec McCowen), the hero of The Philanthropist, is a philologist. In Act I, Philip is insouciantly embroiled in a drawing-room-cum-bedroom farce; in Act II, he is mournfully bogged down in a talky self-analysis of considerable pathos. This makes for a jarring discrepancy of mood without any compensating illumination of meaning. Act I is fun and naughty games. In it, Philip ends up in bed with a Venus's-fly-trap of a girl. His fiancee Celia (Jane Asher) pairs up with a cynical aphorist out of early Aldous Huxley. This hedonist with a literate leer acquires luxuriant narcissistic finesse from the performance of Victor Spinetti.

At the end, Philip seems to personify a biblical adage in reverse. He cannot love his neighbor (or his fiancee) like himself because he does not love himself. Celia leaves him, which makes good sense but rather flat drama. What redeems the evening is McCowen's acting. He has a feel for the role that is as sensitive as a safecracker's fingertips. At one moment he is the bemused absent-minded professor, at another the twinkling champion of verbal pingpong, and at still another, an anguished human with a parched heart.

In its glittering virtuosity, this performance is very close to those of Gielgud and Richardson in Home. The Queen has not yet dubbed him Sir Alec McCowen, but the theater has its own list of knights, and he is one of them.

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