Gilt Without the Lily

"A spade," says a character in one of Christopher Fry's plays, "is never so merely a spade as the word spade would imply." At least not in Fry's plays. Fanciful and stylized, they are written in a verse that it hardly seems fair to call blank. Everything is cloaked in a brocade of metaphors. Was that a rooster's crow? No, it was "the pickaxe voice of a cock, beginning to break up the night." Did it rain? No, "the heavens emptied their pots." Fry uses such figures of speech--more figures than speech--in an attempt to jolt his audience into a fresh recognition of commonplace truths.

Given a rather earthbound production by England's Nottingham Playhouse company, A Yard of Sun still rises to Fry's characteristic pitch, which might be described as cheeky-cosmic. The simplest of his characters can spin out rococo banter about the universe, God and the meaning of life. The setting is a courtyard in Siena, Italy, in 1946. The occasion is the reunion of four men back from the war--a refugee from a concentration camp, a doctor who was a partisan guerrilla, a would-be politician who joined the fascists, and a black marketeer who made a fortune by profiteering. While Siena's annual Polio, an ancient horseracing festival, erupts in the background, the men and their families struggle to come to terms with their past and to learn how to go about their daily business again.

Balance Restored. The key symbolic action of the play comes when one of the men falls off his horse in the Palio, but the horse goes on to win the race any way. Fry's familiar, hopeful theme is that life, like a horse, sometimes has to be given its head to work things out for itself. Unfortunately Christopher Fry's characters and incidents are rarely as surprising or as meticulously well-chosen as his metaphors. His wit is bright, his set pieces are ringing, his sentiment is affecting, but his drama, unhappily, is hollow. The glittering language too often seems to be gilt for a nonexistent lily.

Yet despite its faults, Sun may help to restore some balance to Fry's reputation. Bearing the subtitle A Summer Comedy, it completes a quartet of plays intended to celebrate the seasons and the regenerative powers of the human spirit. When Fry began the cycle in 1948 with The Lady's Not for Burning (spring) and continued two years later with Venus Observed (autumn), his name flared like a rocket over the grayness of postwar theater. He was, it seemed, no less than a successor to the Elizabethans. After his winter play in 1954, The Dark Is Light Enough, the English stage was stormed by the realistic "angry" playwrights, and Fry was jostled off. Suddenly, it seemed, he was no more than an arch and interminably garrulous trifler.

Now, after a 16-year hiatus, which Fry has devoted largely to film scripts and translations of foreign plays. Sun serves as a reminder that his old acclaim and ostracism were both exaggerated. At their best, his plays strike a mean that, if not golden, is a highly polished alloy. Dramatically, he is neither as large nor as small a Fry as he has been taken for.

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