70 Wanting to Be 17

The Chinese Prime Minister is an urbane liar of a play. In a triumph of style over substance, it serves its mental hash like Beluga caviar, pours its intellectual eyewash like Dom Perignon. This sleight-of-hand artistry succeeds for two reasons. Playwright Enid Bagnold loves the English language with rare fidelity, and in the present semi-illiterate state of the U.S. stage, pure English makes an irresistible lover for an audience. Equally indispensable is an actress who can do no wrong from first entrance to final curtain. Margaret Leighton's eyes are wounds of inner pain, her hair is a glimmering tiara, her voice is Baccarat crystal. She could carry a continent, let alone a play.

What she does mesmerically carry off is the portrayal of an egocentric exactress of 70 who does not choose to act her age since she does not feel it. She (which is all the play calls her) is clever in speech, stupid about life. At long last, she wants to be her own woman, though there is no proof that she has ever really been anyone else's. The selfish mistakes of a lifetime gradually filter into her drawing room to offer comic rebuke. One son marries the spitfiery image of his mother, and the couple travels to the brink of divorce. Too little love, rather than too much, has turned another son into a mother's boy, and he has married a nymphomaniac. A discarded husband and father of 29 years before turns up to meet his sons and resample a bit of the vocal and emotional hell that he and their mother can still give each other. Old rage rather than old age is their subject. Alan Webb, as an ancient butler, potters and poeticizes near life's exit with a funny and touching gallantry and even cheats incipient rigor mortis a couple of times.

Old age is what Playwright Bagnold, who is 74, meant to write about, but unwittingly, or so it seems, her play is about the youth complex. The notion of a woman of 70 setting out to find the "real me" would be ludicrous and pathetic if it were not camouflaged by Bagnold's word incense and Leighton's stage magic. What the Margaret Leighton character wants is not to accept the past but to erase it, to be 17 again with all its romantic second chances, or else to live where age enjoys the prestige of youth, symbolized by a mythical figure of her own dream world, a retired Chinese prime minister.

In the play's final speech, she sounds like an old fool being a young fool. She prays to be free of all responsibilities, she does not want a soon-to-be-born grandchild cluttering up her house, and, in fact, she would like to burn the house and sing a secret song of glee before the flames. But to cut adrift from the continuities and content of life is scarcely the way to start a new life, except perhaps second childhood.

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