Caustic Imp

By T.E. Kalem

EARLY DAYS

by David Storey

As he sits in a chair on the stage of the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower The ater, Ralph Richardson somewhat resembles Graham Sutherland's portrait of Winston Churchill. His legs are squared apart and appear sturdily embedded in stone. His arms are welded to the arm rests, yet they seem mobilized to catapult him into action. His eyes are banked fires set in a sulky sullen face a trifle mangled by time. As with Churchill, a pixie lurks beneath Richardson's countenance, momentarily threatening to bolt into some unpredictable bit of mischief.

In Early Days, Richardson plays Sir Richard Kitchen, a cantankerous imp bobbing and weaving his way through errant mists of memory. From moment to moment, Storey's play is both allusive and elusive -- rather like hearing a few bars of music that suddenly break off and then later recur with a disconcertingly poignant resonance. Or like observing an ancient marble statue where the missing arm, leg or head must be pieced together by the viewer's imagination.

Kitchen hallucinates, sometimes he recognizes people, sometimes not, or pretends not. He is old and ill, mere months away from death, yet he is imperious in manner and caustic of tongue. Sometimes, Kitchen grasps the nettle of truth with blazing lucidity; at other times, he stumbles through a fog bank of displaced memories. The people around him, his daughter Mathilda (Sheila Ballantine), his wealthy son-in-law Benson (Gerald Flood), who grudgingly houses him, his watchdog companion Bristol (Edward Judd), whom Kitchen believes to be a So viet spy, and his granddaughter Gloria (Marty Cruickshank) are not full-fleshed characters but more like ghostly presences. Storey utilizes them like light switches to illuminate the rooms of Kitchen's past.

From what the old man says to them, and they about him, we get a tantalizingly opaque profile of his life. The son of a grocer, he rose to be a Cabinet minister and third man in his party's leadership. With the post of Prime Minister in his reach, Kitchen gave a splenetically injudicious "twenty-five-minute speech and a fifteen-second interview" that blasted his career. Beached by the tides of power, the political leviathan shrank to a minnow, indulged as the darling of his party's young hotbloods. This is the lesser half of an in-depth study in remorse. As much a philanderer as a workaholic, Kitchen neglected and betrayed his wife to the point of heartbreak and death. The memory haunts him ("Why did you die, my dear?"), and as he whimpers and then howls his wife's name twice, "Ellen ... Ellen!" toward the icy stars, the play ends in anguish.

Considering that Early Days goes virtually nowhere, it covers an amazing amount of ground. Through Kitchen's lips, Storey has his spare, harsh, tender say about love, life, time, memory and death, about the lust for and loss of power, and of how blood relatives lacerate one another through the shifting values and visions of each new generation.

Kitchen's modes of expression range from the aphoristic ("Anyone who pursues decency in public must lead a disreputable private life") to the apocalyptic: "A man came to interview me the other day. He brought a camera. He asked me about people I should have known ... I couldn't remember. It was all a blank. I said: Tf you don't move soon you'll be caught by the tide.' He said: 'We are thirty-four miles inland. Where is the tide?' 'The tide,' I said, 'is at your heels.' He never stirred." The sum of Storey's wisdom is as bleak as Beckett's: to make sense of life is impossible, to make terms with death is insufferable. Storey (The Changing Room, The Contractor, Home) sometimes writes a mysteriously puzzling line: he never writes a bad one.

If Storey distills English toward stark economy, Richardson bestows further glory on the English acting tradition at its bejeweled best. In the quizzical lift of an eyebrow or the flick of a finger, the caress of a noun or the bark of a verb, in a stilly pause, a deadpan stare, an irrepressibly mocking aside, he is now, and has been for decades , a Jove of craft.

-- By T.E. Kalem

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.