The Redcoats Keep Coming

By T.E. Kalem

Three plays in three tenses: past, present and future

Having made visible inroads on Broadway, British exports are now annexing off-Broadway and the U.S. regional theater. In the past three weeks, Top Girls and Skirmishes opened off-Broadway and Quartermaine's Terms at New Haven's Long Wharf Theater. Interestingly enough, counting Nell Dunn's Steaming, already running at Broadway's Brooks Atkinson Theater, three out of four new British entries are by women, possibly because Britain's feminist consciousness is just now peaking. Top Girls displays some postfeminist tristesse; only Steaming seems earnest in its feminist polemics, ironically garnished with pre-fig leaf nudity.

The opening scene of Top Girls, by Caryl Churchill (author of the long-running off-Broadway hit Cloud Nine), is the strangest of dinner parties; the hostess is alive, but all the guests are dead. Marlene (Gwen Taylor) is a smart, hard-nosed career woman who is celebrating her promotion to managing director of the Top Girls Employment Agency at a London restaurant called La Prima Donna. She has invited a few prima donnas, or "top girls," of past centuries to celebrate with her.

There is Pope Joan (Selina Cadell), who is said to have ascended the throne of St. Peter around A.D. 855 and who was later stoned to death. Also joining the party are Isabella Bird (Deborah Findlay), an intrepid 19th century Scottish traveler; Lady Nijo (Lindsay Duncan), a 13th century Japanese courtesan who became a Buddhist nun; Dull Gret (Carole Hayman), who led an avenging legion of women into the precincts of hell in Brueghel's painting Dulle Griet; and finally, Patient Griselda (Lesley Manville), made famous in Boccaccio and Chaucer as the model of a loyal, submissive wife.

The women chat furiously and funnily about their experiences. Yet the underlying tone is oddly melancholy. Men have debased and abused them, and torn their children from them.

The rest of the play, in which the women of history double in contemporary roles, shows us the price Marlene has paid for her rise. Fleeing her home and family at 17, she left her illegitimate child Angie (Hayman) with her sister Joyce (Findlay) to be raised as Joyce's own. Angie is a touching clod of a girl, dimwitted, lazy and fearful.

The girl's plight triggers a screechy, preachy political cat fight between Marlene and Joyce. Marlene is a staunch advocate of Margaret Thatcher, whom her sister derides as "Hitlerina." The question raised is provocative: Is the future to be divided between a smart, scrambling upper class of no-holds-barred individualists and a permanent underclass of poor souls who are unfit for the survival of the fittest?

This production initiates an admirable transatlantic lend-lease plan between Joseph Papp's Public Theater and Britain's Royal Court Theater. As might be expected, the entire cast is best-of-breed.

More overtly than Top Girls, Catherine Hayes' Skirmishes deals with family conflicts. Among human institutions, the family is the closest relative that the drama has. It is theater in miniform, compacted of love, hate, sibling rivalry, alienation and reconciliation. In capsule form, that describes this play. Playwright Hayes puts two sisters in a room with their dying mother and the pair harrow up the past and the present with bitter intensity and acridly funny put-down humor.

Jean (Suzanne Bertish) and Rita (Fran Brill) seem not to have come from the same womb. Jean is frumpy, asocial, infertile and separated from her husband. Rita is chic, impregnable as a rabbit, and antiseptically fastidious, except when it comes to stealing another woman's husband. Jean has tended the senile, incontinent mother for desolatingly lonely months; Rita has used the Ma Bell commercial method of reaching and touching by phone. Waves of passion rise between the two sisters like water spuming against a coastal reef, then subside in daughterly grief before the great silence: death. Suzanne Bertish's Jean is subcutaneously sensitive, and we feel the sand beneath her skin, the abrasion and desperation of living a life ill lost for either love or duty.

Quartermaine's Terms calls for a more self-effacing style of acting, though the results are scarcely less virtuosic. Unlike Simon Gray's two major U.S. successes, Butley and Otherwise Engaged, this semicomic, semipoignant drama, set in a bleary backwater of academe, does not focus on a caustic wit who tosses poisoned darts at the world around him. Quartermaine's Terms is Gray's gentlest and most compassionate play. No stiff upper lips need apply. The drama's hero, or non-hero, might be called "Mr. Cellophane," after a song in the musical Chicago. People see right through him. They scarcely remember his name, though "St. John [pronounced Sinjon] Quartermaine" (Remak Ramsay) seems fairly emphatic. He dozes off in mid-conversation and totally forgets one of his own classes.

He is part of fate's minus pool of mediocrities but a quite decent human being. Ditto the rest of the staff (exemplary actors all) at the Cull-Loomis School of English for Foreigners. Call it cul-de-sac for short. "Teaching foreigners is a job for failures," says one. Still, in a period of four years, life does seep into the arid crevices of their existence. There are births, marriages, deaths, philanderings and conversions.

As far as Quartermaine is concerned, these are like whispers in the anteroom of his mind. The thunderclap comes when he gets the sack after two decades at the school. "O Lord," he says like a last gasp of wind escaping from a toy balloon. He cannot comprehend it, and such is Ramsay's control of the nuances of his part that the playgoer is as stricken as he is.

--By T.E. Kalem This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.