Black Magic

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

IN THE FIRST SCENE OF WILDEST Dreams, a new tragicomedy staged by its prolific author, Alan Ayckbourn, for London's Royal Shakespeare Company, four unhappy middle-class people are enhancing dull lives with a homemade role- playing game a la Dungeons & Dragons. They speak pseudo Old English mingled with gobbledygook as their revealing fantasy characters -- a woman warrior for a young lesbian, a lizard with strange powers for a pimply computer nerd, a wise old seer for a tedious teacher and a princess who speaks in tongues for his faded, flustered wife -- obsess about visions and quests. By the end, two of the four are certifiably mad, and the other two are silently miserable. The cause of their downfall is the very thing most people would advocate to help them -- real relationships with real people in quest of real love.

Actually the source of their agony is the same person, a gushy and gauche young woman (Sophie Thompson, sister of Oscar winner Emma) on whom both of the men and the lesbian fix their romantic longings. The same bent for imagination that makes them so keen for the game lets them see undying devotion where only vague kindness is meant. Sweet but terminally insensitive and preoccupied with her own problems as the battered wife of a stalking husband, this unlikely femme fatale remains unaware of her allure until much too late.

Ayckbourn has placed the action on three sets that fill the RSC's small stage and position the actors mere feet, if not inches, from the audience as they portray over-the-top derangement. All are good, and the two nuttiest -- Gary Whitaker, as the youth who comes to believe he is an alien, and Brenda Blethyn, as the neglected wife who regresses into toddlerhood -- rip open psychic dungeons to unleash dragons of despair.

W.A.H. III