Back on the Trapeze

''I've told everybody to anticipate disaster, fiasco, failure." says Playwright William (The Time of Your Life) Saroyan of his new show. Its title: The London Comedy, or Sam the Highest Jumper of Them All. But as he races to get ready for opening night at London's experimental East End Theatre Royal April 5. the Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze is too busy to be bothered with his own ad monition. He is still trying to decide whether the cast should sing the first-act finale--he is, in fact, still writing his play.

Saroyan began rehearsals fortnight ago with little more than a title, has let dia logue grow out of onstage argument among the actors, has written and rewritten so furiously that there are seldom enough copies of the latest script to see the cast through a complete scene. But everyone agrees that the play is pure Saroyan the latest gust of a strong second wind that seems to be reviving a 51 -year-old writer who has long seemed written out.

Good God. In the age of Beckett and Ionesco. Bill Saroyan's zaniness seems almost conservative. The new play has a bank clerk named Sam Harkaharkalark, a bank president named Mr. Horniman, and a succession of other Saroyantic types who deposit both cash and wisdom. Among them: a stripper named Daisy Dimple, a blind man who doubles as "squopper'' or tragic chorus, a gypsy who spouts Greek that translates into Saroyanese. ("All is not all. How could it ever be?" ) Also in the cast of characters: a girl who is having a baby by an American named Marlon Brando Cavalcanti and who worries about radioactive fallout, a Scotland Yard inspector named Overboard, and a Russian who stands on his head. And then there is an "ambassador from the audience" who sits onstage and asks for encores of certain attractive bits of business, notably the thunder sound effects.

What all these people are up to even the playwright is not sure. But by last week both he and the cast were almost convinced that Sam is about a bank robbery in which the take includes 500,000 defective pound notes. (A Bank of England cashier named G. O. Dodd has signed them "Good God" by error.) Sam is accused and fired. A priest gets hold of the cash and distributes it to unwed pregnant women who "promise to stop it." Sam develops "delusions of grandeur, paranoia and schizophrenia." and decides that he is the world's greatest high jumper. Understandably. Saroyan suggests that "any reality must come from the beholder. After all, a madman's fantasies are the most real thing in the world--to the madman."

Price of Peace. Still, Saroyan is laboring mightily to give the beholder a break. Nights and weekends he holes up in his $25-a-day Savoy Hotel room, bats out ten pages of dialogue every night. In the theater, his lugubrious, fiercely mustachioed face looms over a thick athletic frame that is forever on the move: he bounces onstage to demonstrate high-jumping technique or prowls the auditorium calling out sudden changes in the script. He carves the air with the sweeping gestures of an orchestra conductor, comes to roost like a stork, one leg cocked, on the rail of the pit. "Give it music." he may order an actor, or "Give it a Marlon Brando mumble."

Secret of Saroyan's return to creativity is the U.S. tax collector, who chased him abroad. Saroyan figures that he is about $60,000 in hock to the Department of Internal Revenue, and he is trying to earn the price of coming home. In Paris he sold a play (The Paris Comedy, or The Secret of Lily) to Movie Producer Darryl Zanuck. The stage version, which he meant to write in nine days, cost him 13 ("There were lots of parties"), and it opened in Vienna last month to good notices. Saroyan has also written a Moscow Comedy, or No One in His Right Mind, plans similar plays about Americans abroad in Vienna, Berlin, Australia. "It's going to be a series, like Granddaughter of Lassie'' says he, and it ought to earn him a trip back to Fresno and the vineyards where he began.

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