Dead Center

By JAY COCKS

IN CELEBRATION Directed by LINDSAY ANDERSON Screenplay by DAVID STOREY

This was David Storey's second play, written before he had fully found and measured his silences. Only Pinter can make the unspoken as eloquent as Storey, can round an intimation into a metaphor, a nuance into a theme. Storey's plays make strange music, strike notes that reverberate just on the edge of consciousness.

In Celebration concerns the 40th wedding anniversary of the Shaws, and their three sons who return home to make an occasion of it. Mr. Shaw (Bill Owen) has a weak heart from working in the coal mines of Northern England. Mrs. Shaw (Constance Chapman), doted on and fussed over, defers to her husband but remains an enigmatic center of her troubled household. The three sons are creatures of compromise and uncertainty. Andrew, the eldest (Alan Bates), has forsaken a legal career to paint geometric canvases. His flattery and good will always carry an edge of irony that barely conceals a fearful rage. Out of the urgencies of inner demons, he proposes a familial "vengeance," in which he wants to enlist the brothers. Colin (James Bolam) is a glib expert in "industrial relations." Steven, the youngest (Brian Cox), is fighting unsuccessfully to finish a novel. He expresses himself in tentative gestures and terse sentences. Yet it is he who manages to put the crucial point to Andrew: "Exactly what kind of vengeance did you have in mind?"

There can be no reprisals among the Shaws because no wound can be located; there is only an ache, a feeling of deadness at the center. Indeed, Mrs. Shaw does seem, for Storey, somehow the source of all the frustration and un-channeled fury. What finally makes In Celebration subordinate to such later works as Home and The Contractor is that Mrs. Shaw remains as remote from us as she does from her family. Storey cannot bring us near enough to see or understand the failures of the past. The film gives the sense of the revelation of a scar. This impression is reinforced by Director Lindsay Anderson's remark that for Storey, "the circumstances of the piece are extremely personal." Storey's father is a coal miner in the north of England. Like Steven, Storey has written novels and like Andrew, has also tried his hand at painting.

Under Anderson's direction, the movie gathers enormous force, partly from the raw skill of its actors, partly from the accumulating tension of frustration. Anderson has tried to turn the play's deepest flaw to its own advantage. In Celebration has power from energy that is never released. Anderson's skill cannot make the play any more complete or successful, but it does make it happen superbly well.

Anderson and Storey have wisely chosen not to open up the original play for this screen adaptation. Virtually all the action still occurs in a single room.

This feeling of confinement becomes a crucial stylistic element. The cast, in tact from the original Royal Court pro duction, is exemplary. Besides the plea sures of discovering unfamiliar talent -- the cast works largely in British theater and television -- it is fine to watch Alan Bates' shrewd, divisive Andrew.

In Celebration, more modest than Anderson's recent movie work (If, O Lucky Man), still makes an exception ally intelligent film. It is also part of the American Film Theater's second season, a fact worth noting because In Celebration is ideally what the A.F.T. should be up to: committing to permanent record on film the best pos sible productions of plays that for American audiences might otherwise remain titles in the bibliographies of major writers.

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