Bore Is a Four-Letter Word

For all its notoriety, Lady Chatterley's Lover is, essentially, just an extravagant sentimentalization of sex and nature through which D. H. Lawrence passionately protested against industrial civilization and Victorian prudery. But despite what Katherine Anne Porter has called its "imbecilic harmlessness," the book still draws devout support, as was shown during last year's obscenity trial in Britain when Lawrence's four-letter words and what the prosecutor called his "reverence for man's genitals" became great crusading issues. Certified by the court as not obscene, Lady Chatterley last week came onstage as a play (at a private theater club). Though slow and static, the play, by British dramatist John Hart, served as an intriguing new comment on the work: spoken out loud on a stage, the Lawrencian lines simply sounded ludicrous.

The four-letter words were all there, floating across the footlights, as one critic noted, "before an audience more cowed than startled.'' But even in a private club, blackouts had to serve in lieu of the novel's sexual bouts. The evening's one unforgettable moment occurred by accident. During the cloying scene wherein the lovers (Jeanne Moody as Lady Chatterley, Walter Brown as Gamekeeper Mellors) decorate one another with garlands, Mellors started to slide out of bed and stopped short, paralyzed and fluffing his lines. In a play whose major theme is that bodies should not be embarrassing, his panic was caused by the discovery that his shirt was out of reach.

Reviewing the production, and indirectly the novel, the Daily Mail found it merely boring, and the London Times suggested that Lady Chatterley is "basically Elinor Glyn scattered with a lot of specious philosophizing.''

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