Platitudes on Parade

The Unknown Soldier and His Wife. The only evil of war left unmentioned in Peter Ustinov's three-hour verbal artillery barrage at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater is the antiwar play. Despite a sprinkling of quips, Ustinov lays down a lethal set of pacifist platitudes that ultimately calls for an intellectual gas mask.

Bertolt Brecht, on whom Ustinov relies heavily for his inspiration, was content with the Thirty Years' War for Mother Courage. Unknown Soldier gobbles up 2,000 years of battle history, from Roman times to the present. Small wonder that digestive torpor soon sets in. Ustinov's hero is an unknown soldier who is always dying just before his recurringly pregnant wife can give birth. Like Brecht, Ustinov appears to believe that war is a continuation of the class struggle. The mighty spill the blood of the lowly in a kind of cruel game, a black farce. It is a question whether Ustinov's lines supply comic relief or comic sabotage to his theme. Says a general: "I sense a trap." Replies an archbishop: "That's unusual for a military man."

There are interludes of genuine hilarity, chiefly provided by Bob Dishy as a zany, Teutonically accented technician of ever-improving death machines who is always ready to sell his services to the highest bidder. The cast delivers the lines as if they were quotations, and even such accomplished performers as Howard Da Silva and Brian Bedford seem a trifle stilted. Christopher Walken, however, breathes radiant innocence into the unknown soldier, and stirs the only honest emotion of the evening.

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