New Direction

By T.E. Kalem

MOLLY by SIMON GRAY

Molly is quite unlike any play that Britain's Simon Gray has written. Seeing the work in a late dress-rehearsal phase of its world premiere at Spoleto, one cannot properly evaluate the drama's full potential, but cannot fail to mark a signal change of direction.

In Butley and Otherwise Engaged, which have been Gray's hit plays, the central figure has been a kind of witty monster of unfeeling. In Molly, feelings and emotions are not only unguarded, they are sometimes nakedly out of control. What comes as a surprise is to find Gray making a defense of lies told out of a tenderness for others: "If we didn't lie to the people we love and live with, we wouldn't be able to live with them."

The four people in Molly tell some bitter home truths as well. The play takes place in the English countryside in the 1930s. Molly Tredley (Christina Pickles) is a fortyish woman with a frustrated and gnawing need for sex. Her husband Teddy (Michael Higgins), some 20 years her senior, is irascible, quite deaf and has always been impotent. His comforts are booze and the bantering palship of a spinster nurse-companion, Eve (Pauline Flanagan).

This becalmed, almost Chekhovian household is about to be consumed in a flash fire of passion. A young villager is hired to be both gardener and chauffeur. Oliver (Tom Waites) is a muscular lout and nothing to look at, but one lazy, empty afternoon, Molly seduces him.

Soon she makes Oliver a live-in member of the household. When the puritanical Eve catches wise, she gives notice. But Molly wins Eve back by pleading that she desperately needs her. The need to be needed is an unbroken strand that runs through the play.

Deaf but not blind, Teddy spots the lovers cavorting outside his bedroom window one day and summarily orders Oliver off the premises. The boy fears that he will never see Molly again. He goes berserk, picks up a pair of garden shears and plunges them repeatedly into the old man's stomach. After that, the plot takes on the melodramatic twists of a detective thriller.

Despite the taut direction of Stephen Hollis, the cast is uneven and does not provide the claustrophobic mood that the play clearly demands. Tom Waites is fine as Oliver, and Pauline Flanagan's Eve is a model of laced-up propriety masking inner compassion. Christina Pickles conveys the teasing coquettishness and parched loins of Molly well, but never makes her love for the boy convincing. For a man who is obsessed by the approach of death and his wife's infidelity, Michael Higgins' Teddy is a shade too passive.

The little gem of a theater that houses Molly would be worth a review in itself. The Dock Street Theater opened in 1736 and is said to be the oldest professional theater in the U.S. The present playhouse represents a 1937 restoration that resembles a religious meetinghouse fashioned with seasoned, dark-hued wood and seats that resemble church pews. For Simon Gray and Charleston's Spoleto Festival, the old house represents fresh beginnings and new horizons.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.