Toward Bedlam

By T.E. Kalem

BUTLEY

A day in the death of Ben Butley.

Butley teaches English at the University of London, but this is not a day on which he could possibly focus his eyes on a student or a lecture note. Alcohol has become the hemlock of his middle age; he gulps straight from the bottle and his self-destructive binges have begun to overlap. This is the day that his wife (Holland Taylor) tells him that she is leaving him permanently for another man. More homo than hetero, Butley is further staggered to learn that his colleague-protege is dropping him for another lover. To compound the bitterness, Butley's book on T.S. Eliot is getting absolutely nowhere. Butley is the human equivalent of a rotting apple in a rotting barrel.

He is also the most mesmeric anti-hero to grip the Anglo-American stage since Bill Maitland in John Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence. The irony is that such anti-heroes require heroic performances from the actors who play them. Nicol Williamson erupted volcanically in Inadmissible, and Alan Bates (TIME, Nov. 6) is a flood tide of brilliance in Butley. The two plays and the two characters have a good deal in common. One feels that if Maitland and Butley could harness their energy and alter the direction of their venomous wit, they could put their lives straight in no time.

The difference between the plays is that Osborne is the master of long, eloquent, spellbinding monologues, while Britain's Simon Gray, author of last season's transvestite farce, Wise Child, is more the fencing master of brief, bitchy repartee. All of the fun is put-down humor, incessant gamesmanship, at which the British are virtually unbeatable. Butley's eviscerating wit is cool, cruel and precise, which does not prevent it from being unutterably funny.

The dissimilarity between Maitland and Butley is that Maitland is so introspectively self-concerned that he reveals his total being, while Butley is relentlessly analytical of other people and utterly blind to himself. This inhibits the playgoer's compassion. Maitland's experiences are a distillation of pain; Butley's, merely a concentrated display of panic. Nonetheless, there is considerable pathos in Butley, for his manic verbal foolery is the despair of a man who cannot afford the respite of silence.

While the rest of the cast is exemplary, it has only a shadowy existence on the periphery of the play. On from the first curtain to the last, Bates makes the evening blazingly his as a man slouching toward bedlam--hair bedraggled, trousers rumpled, eyes aglaze, and with an adder's tongue in his cheek. It is an indelible image that will find its way into dramatic legend.--T.E. Kalem

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