Fiendishly Clever Frolic

By T.E.K.

THE AU PAIR MAN by HUGH LEONARD

One test of a two-character play is whether the playgoer develops the restive desire, or the furtive hope, that one or two other characters will momentarily enliven the stage. The Au Pair Man passes that test handsomely. One is captivated, fascinated and pleasurably teased by Mrs. Elizabeth Rogers (Julie Harris) and her friend Eugene (Charles Burning). They are good company and the rich density of their natures makes them seem like a stageful of people.

What the stage at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater is actually full of is an incredible, moldering array of Victorian furnishings and doodads, including a grandfather clock that intones Land of Hope and Glory and sprouts tiny Union Jacks. The set is a top-floor apartment in an architecturally senile London building. The ceiling leaks plaster, the walls are held upright by a huge wall divider, and one can step unwarily on a rug, as Eugene does, and sink a foot or so through the rotting floorboards.

Symbolically, this spells the fall of the British Empire. But the sly, elusive, opinionated, middle-aged minx who occupies these quarters is not about to let the Establishment side down. Mrs. Rogers' husband is frequently away--if he exists. The playwright is ambiguous. She craves the company of a virile male. Eugene, an Irish bill collector, fills the bill, and she collects him in an obliquely Pinteresque seduction scene. She clothes and feeds him and teaches him manners rather after the fashion of a reverse Pygmalion. Above all, she teaches him that, in England, veneer is worth far more than character if one is to be a proper social arriviste.

Eugene arrives, all right, only to be enmeshed in a tricky fate that somewhat resembles the ending of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust. There a Briton, made captive in the jungle by a fellow Briton, finds that he must spend the rest of his life reading Dickens aloud for his cap tor's delectation.

While the narrative line meanders a bit, and laughs do not detonate every minute, much of the evening consists of a fiendishly clever talkfest. Some of it is bantering class raillery, some of it Shavian disquisition--as when Mrs. Rogers delivers a monologue on the advantages of a strictly segregated society--and some of it prime non sequiturish zaniness out of the theater of the absurd. When Eugene goes into a huff, for in stance, and threatens to leave the apartment, Mrs. Rogers tells him that he must not go: "The time is 3 in the morning . . . streets are filled with Australians."

Delivery and timing are, of course, essential to the comic value of such a situation. Julie Harris and Charles Durning possess both to perfection. They fence together like Olympic champions. Harris gives the performance of a star's star, while Durning acts with a subtlety, daring and solidity that he has not achieved before, even in That Championship Season. Whatever qualms some drama critics have expressed about Joseph Papp's play choices, his first season at the helm of the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater has brought a superior caliber of acting such as was never seen or even remotely dreamt of there in past years.

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