Return of the Phoenix

When Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning was produced in 1948, a great new hone seemed to have dawned for the English-speaking theater. None of Fry's other plays (A Phoenix Too Frequent, Venus Observed, The Dark Is Light Enough) matches Lady in language and, particularly, in dramatic coherence. But even at his weakest, Fry has led a triumphant one-man parade against the modern theater's main movements. Where virtually all other playwrights were committed to realism or surrealism. Fry wrote romantic and imaginative drama; where poetry had been banished from the stage so severely that even T. S. Eliot toned his verse plays down to almost imperceptibly heightened prose. Fry flashed his poetry with the joy of a juggler in the sun.

But for the past seven years, except for translations and movie work (Ben Hur, the forthcoming Barabbas), he has been silent, in the grip of what he has described as a crisis of confidence. Last week his first play since 1954 opened, strongly suggesting that at 53 Fry is far from written out.

Illuminated Law. The play is Curtmantle, about Henry II and Archbishop Thomas Becket. a theme previously treated by T.S. Eliot and Jean Anouilh. With Anouilh's Becket still running in New York and soon to open in London, Fry tactfully avoided competition, opened his play in an odd setting: the new civic theater at Tilburg, in The Netherlands, where he hoped for a quiet tryout. The fact that the play was given in Dutch would help him, thought Fry. to concentrate less on language than on structure, always his weakness. Hardly a sneak preview, Curtmantle* opened to an audience of 900 (including the Dutch Prime Minister) who found the drama a long way from the other treatments of the theme.

Eliot's brilliant Murder in the Cathedral is a churchly pageant, its great poetry close to litany, concentrating on Becket's temptation to martyrdom and using his murder for savage satire on the hypocritical rationalizations of tyrants. Anouilh's Becket attempts--without much psychological or historical depth--to show the love-hate relationship between the King and the servant--friend who turns against him in order to serve the church. Fry sought to concentrate more on Henry than on Becket and to illuminate the interplay of law--civil, canon, moral, divine. Says Fry: "Henry was essentially religious, also blasphemous, also superstitious, devoted to law yet also in himself anarchical." Having done careful research. Fry tried to tell the whole story from "the proud years when all events were Henry" to the King's final, ignominious defeat at the hands of his own sons and the son of his old enemy. Louis VII of France. Admits Fry wryly: "There are several plays there."

Fresh Start. In obvious need of rewriting, anticlimactic after Becket's second-act death and sometimes weighed down by clogged and archaic language, Curtmantle is nonetheless aflash with the best of Fry. His Eleanor is a brightly caustic Queen, and his Henry is a rough King who could cry out that Becket's mouth "was making words like a purse farting," or, with mightiness, denounce "you lords of the Church Arrogant, like an old god crazy with his thunderbolts."

The poetry of Curtmantle is less lyrical, less image-filled, more argumentative than usual in Fry. A typical passage occurs when Henry jealously notes Becket's popularity in England:

There you have the measure of these people, These vulnerable thousands who look to us For their safe conduct across time. You can labour night and day to give them A world that's comprehensible. But their idolatry goes to any man-- Though he reeks of fault and cares less about their lives

Than he does for a fine point of heresy Which wouldn't shake a hair in God's nostril-- So long as they think he bargains with a world beyond them, Knows how to sop up their sins And give unction to the smell of death . . .

After the opening last week, with fresh notes on the script, Christopher Fry sat down at his antique portable typewriter --he cherishes its ancient type face -and went back to work. "At times I came close to abandoning this play," he said, "but I knew if I gave it up I should probably never write anything again. I nearly have Henry out of my system now, and I feel I can make a fresh start."

*A nickname of Henry II, derived from his characteristic short cloak.

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