Laureate of Loss

By * T.E. Kalem

The British never seem to lack for good playwrights. They have an uncanny gift for writing well about their nation even when they think ill of it. They can poke peevishly in the guttering embers of empire and the grate of memory flickers with glories past. David Storey has an option on this territory, and he looks back more in grief than in anger. He searches for the severed link with the imperial past. How did today's termites, he seems to ask, descend from yesterday's titans? He is a dramatic laureate of loss.

Last season, in Home, Storey made old age in a mental home his metaphor for the decline and fragmentation of empire. This season, in The Contractor, which recently concluded a U.S. premiere engagement at New Haven's Long Wharf Theater and is scheduled to open in San Francisco on March 14, Storey uses the raising and striking of a huge tent as the symbol of the rise and fall of national greatness. In a still larger sense, the tent is emblematic of the vanity of human wishes--in art, in politics, in science, in business, in love, in life. As it flaps to the stage floor at the end of the play like a great wounded sea bird, one can almost hear the spectral voice of Ezra Pound: "Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down."

Tarantulas. The putting up and taking down of the tent is all that actually happens in The Contractor, but it is utterly fascinating. For one thing, it is an intricate, large-scale operation requiring precise teamwork from the cast. For another, it is one of those rare occasions where a man's work life is actually depicted on the stage. The stress, the satisfaction and the ultimate futility of a community of effort are all present.

The contractor, Ewbank (William Swetland), is on the verge of bankruptcy, but he wants to give his daughter a splashy lawn wedding reception. His workers are sullen, sassy and querulous. Two of them, Fitzpatrick (Emery Battis) and Marshall (John Cazale), verbally dominate the play, like stinging tarantulas. On a certain level, Storey has drawn a scathing portrait of the welfare state prole. But Storey never withdraws his compassion from any of these men. When the foreman, Kay (John Braden), is exposed as an ex-convict, and another workman is mocked because his wife deserted him for his impotence, Storey fills each man's eyes with a scalding, terrible hurt. The wedding never takes place; the tent has been erected in vain.

To the Marrow. The degradation of language parallels the decay of power and majesty. One workman, Glendenning (Tom Alkins), is a tongue-knotted baboon who cannot put his feet, let alone his words, where he wants to. With this handful of human rubble --stuttering, stumbling, abject--Storey evokes the race that gave the world the speech of Shakespeare, the King James Bible and Churchill.

To attempt such a difficult play is a vast credit to the Long Wharf Theater and its intrepid artistic director Arvin Brown. To marshal an American cast and make it seem British to the marrow is an equal triumph for Director Barry Davis and his admirable players. They have honored a playwright who is an impressive successor to Osborne and Pinter. Only rarely does one encounter a deep, possibly a noble soul who regards the eclipse of his civilization and his folk as direr than his own death.

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