Queen and Hippy

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

UNDER THE ILEX

by Clyde Talmage

"You have a way with men," says Lytton Strachey to his endlessly adoring companion, Dora Carrington. "I wish I knew your secret."

The remark aptly summarizes much of the poignancy, torment and humor that marked the 16 messy years of their relationship, years out of which Clyde Talmage has distilled a rather too neat but very lively play. Under the Ilex, at New Haven's Long Wharf Theater, provides its only actors, Julie Harris and Leonard Frey, with roles rich in opportunities for virtuosity that they gratefully, even hungrily, exploit.

Strachey, of course, was the eminent biographer of Eminent Victorians (among others) and one of the central figures in that most prominent and influential of this century's literary circles, the Bloomsbury group. He was also a homosexual who was incapable of sustaining an intimate relationship with any of his male lovers. Carrington was a painter of modest gifts who gave him constancy despite having, as Strachey's biographer Michael Holroyd put it, a "solitary and promiscuous nature, like that of a cat." Indeed, so intense was her necessarily platonic devotion that she committed suicide shortly after he died in 1932 rather than go on without him.

It is the contemplation of this act, and the decision to go through with it, that provides Talmage with the framework for his play. Perhaps despairing of handling the glittering literary cast that thronged through his characters' lives, the playwright turns everyone from Virginia Woolf to Carrington's sailor-lover into throwaway lines. As a theatrical contrivance this works amusingly. But it is one thing to simplify, for dramatic convenience, the structure of historical lives and quite another to oversimplify their emotional tenor. In Talmage's hands, the brilliant Strachey becomes a fussy queen; the dangerously unstable Carrington, a ditsy pre-hippy. Like Noel Coward, Talmage seems to think the ideal relationship between a man and a woman is that of innocently playful and bantering siblings to whom heterosexuality is no more than one of nature's less tasteful jokes.

One feels almost churlish for observing that the historical truth is more complex and interesting than that, so effective is Under the Ilex as a theater piece. Talmage has a genuine talent for witty dialogue, Charles Nelson Reilly has directed with an inventiveness that is only occasionally overenthusiastic, and the actors are near perfect. One suspects there is more gallantry in Prey's Strachey, more simple romanticism and humanity in Harris' Carrington than either history or the script invested them with. Be that as it may, one also suspects that in a theatrical climate where the domestication of homoexoticism for the middle-class market is a prime order of business, this play may well find its place as a sort of La Cage aux Folles sans score, but avec an up-market literary-historical twist.

--By Richard Schickel