Bloody Saturday

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

OTHERWISE ENGAGED by SIMON GRAY

One Saturday afternoon in London, a publisher named Simon sits down to play, in what he hopes will be uninterrupted silence, a new recording of Parsifal. He has heard no more than a few measures, however, when life--importunate, inconvenient, thoroughly messy life--comes knocking at his door. And it keeps knocking, in the form of relatives, friends, acquaintances, strangers, all afternoon, testing his carefully trained incapacity for human relationships, even simple understanding.

Some of Simon's callers are merely nuisances: a boorish top-floor tenant (John Christopher Jones), a boozily aggressive litterateur, his girl friend who is soon enough making a stripped-to-the-waist play for a book contract. Others have more powerful claims on him: a brother stunted by failure, an old school enemy in suicidal despair because Simon has casually alienated the affections of the woman he loves, a wife driven into a dismal affair by Simon's emotional sterility. As they attack Simon from many directions, their function is to reveal the seamless perfection of his ability to withstand all efforts to draw him into the mainstream of life. In the end, they conspire with the superb Tom Courtenay to reveal Simon not only as a hypnotically fascinating theatrical figure but also, perhaps, as a cautionary archetype of our age.

Alan Bates put an angrier edge on Simon when he originated the part in London, but there is much to be said for the sweet slyness (and the dead eyes) of Courtenay's interpretation. He gets the same mileage out of Playwright Gray's powerfully witty lines, which are the source of Simon's charm. Their inventiveness and stylishness keep the other characters from flying out of his orbit while keeping audiences riveted in their seats and even caring about the s.o.b.

Nowadays most people are so slovenly in their use of language that he who talks not just in parsable sentences but in well-constructed paragraphs can exert a magical force on his auditors, who generally realize too late (as Simon's do) that he is using words not to reveal but to conceal. He also uses them as he does his phonograph -- to drown out the sounds of pain, to keep everyone at a distance from his precious, empty self. It is a perversion of language's basic function, almost a parody of it, and a clear and present danger of literacy, which, like any virtue, can be carried to excess. It is wise of Gray to note the phenomenon, kindly of him to bring it to our attention in such an often hilarious manner, supremely witty of him to make a play that will most appeal to people of the sort he has so wickedly satirized -- the pridefully literate.

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