Who Plays God?

By T.E.Kalem

WHOSE LIFE IS IT ANYWAY?

By Brian Clark

In earlier times, the question posed by this play's title would never have arisen. Life was God's, to give and to take. But medical technology's present ability to sustain inert human remnants poses a fresh moral dilemma. Between medical authority and an individual's right to decide his own fate, who plays God?

Ken Harrison (Tom Conti) is paralyzed from the neck down after a car crash. Possessing a terrible lucidity about his sorry state, Harrison wants to die. Self-righteously governed by a rigid ethical imperative, the doctor in charge, Dr. Emerson (Philip Bosco), means to prolong Harrison's existence.

Coffined under the white sheets of a hospital bed, Harrison is a lively tribute to the resilience of the human spirit under duress. A sculptor by craft, Harrison has a witty tongue, an agile intelligence and a wicked gift for logic and paradox; yet his plight makes his animated flow of mockingly funny words self-scalding. Conti makes the character an irresistible charmer whose naughty pillow talk seduces the nursing staff and even Dr. Scott (Jean Marsh of Upstairs, Downstairs renown), who loses her professional cool along with part of her heart.

The play is didactic and padded with anemic subplots. It lives through Conti. Quite apart from his resonant vocal range, he has wondrously expressive eyes, incendiary in rage, impish in mischief, grave in contemplation and stinging in pain. Few Broadway debuts are so auspiciously marked on the dateless calendar of brilliance. It is a measure of Conti "s achievement that we cheer his victory unto death and mourn the loss of the man in the same instant.

For much of his career Tom Conti has been called the British Dustin Hoffman. He looks so much like Hoff man that he once fooled even himself. "I did a film a couple of years ago," he says, "and there was a bit in which I was lying upside down, unconscious in a sailboat. The shot came up later on when I was watching the rushes and I thought. 'God! That's Dustin Hoffman!' " Conti also finds himself in odd positions in Whose Life Is It Any way?, but not for a second does the audience doubt whom it is seeing. The play belongs to Conti, and if Dustin Hoffman is not careful, he may some day be identified as the American Tom Conti.

Though he is now 37, Conti came to real prominence in Britain only three years ago in Frederic Raphael's remarkable television series, The Glittering Prizes, which followed a group of Cambridge students from college days in the '50s to careers in the '70s. Conti played the lead, Adam Morris, a witty Jewish outsider who becomes a novelist. American TV critics cheered his performance when the series was shown on many PBS stations last year and applauded again when Conti played Norman in Alan Ayckbourn's comic trilogy, The Norman Conquests. Conti now has his own groupies among PBS fans who ask, "Why did it take so long for Tom Conti to be discovered?"

As it happens, Conti was asking himself that not so very long ago. There were times when he considered some other line of work. He plays the flamenco guitar with professional skill. He is fascinated by medicine and thought seriously about going to medical school. His conversation still leans toward the clinical, and in the course of a couple of hours he will discourse about antibiotics, the development of a new blood disinfectant, and a chemical theory of causality: "We're the sum of our chemicals, and we have no control over the electro-chemical changes that run through our bodies. In a chemical sense perhaps, we're predestined."

So, chemically speaking, Conti has been an actor since he was born. One side of his equation, his father, was an Italian hairdresser who had immigrated to Scotland. The other side, his mother, was a Scot, and Conti grew up in Paisley, near Glasgow. Being dark and half Italian in the land of the fair was not always easy, however, and Conti was subjected to the same kind of bias Adam Morris encounters in The Glittering Prizes. Says he: "I had the odd stone thrown at me. When that happened, I did what my father told me to doI ran like hell!" He went to Roman Catholic schools, attended the Glasgow College of Dramatic Art, then worked in repertory. He married an actress, Kara Wilson, who temporarily gave up the profession when their daughter Nina, now five, was born.

That same year, 1973, Conti got his first break, playing a Brazilian guerrilla in Christopher Hampton's Savages. "It was real luck," he says jokingly. "There weren't too many people in England who looked the part. Thank you, Dad!" That role led to The Glittering Prizes, which made his name. Since then Conti has had a couple of commercial flops to go along with his successes, and because of his independence and desire to test himself with unusual scripts, his career will probably always have its ups and downs. "But Tom is one of those people who will always be rediscovered," says Playwright Ayckbourn. "He is an idiosyncratic actor and a very strong personality."

To Conti the thrill of acting is in taking chances, whether they are offbeat plays or daring ways of acting. He will occasionally vary his lines in Whose Life, for instance. Says he: "I sometimes ad lib or sail close to the wind. The most exciting thing is to be on the razor's edge and not cut your feet."

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