Fdlstaff Returns

Two of the biggest hits of the London theater season come from the pen of Ben Travers, an 89-year-old playwright who might well have been expected to have taken his final curtain. The National Theater has revived Travers' Plunder, serene fare today but daring when it was first produced 48 years ago because it set jewel theft and murder in a French-window farce. And brand new is The Bed Before Yesterday, a West End comedy that stars Joan Plowright as a foul-tempered, filthy-rich, frustrated widow belatedly discovering the pleasures of the marriage bed. The double-header triumph has earned Travers acclaim he has not received in decades. Says Guardian Critic Michael Billington: "It is heartening to find a comedy that comes down so wittily and unequivocally on the side of life."

Approving Bottoms. Between the wars--World I and II--Travers turned out a series of farces sketching a Wode-housean gallery of silly asses of the English upper class, alas unrelieved by a Jeeves. "They were quite good, but just things for laughter," Travers recalls. By the '50s, this collection of emotional still lifes seemed too pallid for the English stage, so Travers retired to the seaside to watch cricket. But when he was well into his 80s he decided to try again, and succeeded in broadening his vision and style without losing his comic bite, a feat that eluded even Bernard Shaw in his declining years.

Travers, a pint-size, cigarette-smoking Falstaff, attributes his personal revival largely to a liberalizing of English society. He much admires the realism of the new generation of English playwrights, such as John Osborne and David Storey. Indeed, he tried his comeback because he feels "there is something to be said now which I've never been allowed to say in the past." The younger dramatists had cleared the way by campaigning against the official stage censor, a punctilious guardian of manners and language for the starchy upper-crust audience that had so inhibited English theater. (In the 1940s, one censor boasted to Travers of this ultimate stroke of permissiveness: "I was the first censor to pass the word bottom." The office was abolished in 1968.)

Liberated from the conventions that made it "improper and unpleasant to reveal anything about sex," Travers felt he could create characters like Alma, the heroine of Bed. By the last act, Alma is chasing her fatigued new husband back into the bedroom; audiences affectionately cheer her on to a rendezvous that completes the comic transformation from Victorian prude to exuberant earth mother.

Rights to Bed have already been sold in a dozen countries, and Travers has completed two more comedies that his producers are holding for coming seasons, bringing his lifetime total to 23 plays. He has moved back to London and plans to stay. A man about town again, he dines out several nights a week with theater friends. When one of them recently brought up the subject of the ultimate end of his long career, Travers was calm and in character. Said he: "I want my tombstone to read, This is where the real fun begins.' "

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