Since the late 50’s, the English theater has been staging contemporary studies in class warfare. Spokesmen for those whom Max Beerbohm called “the unmentioned by Debrett” have by now accustomed even American ears to the social tensions of U and non-U dialogue, to the comic anguish of a society in which a dropped “h” or a misplaced fish knife can erect impenetrable barriers between its citizens. Of course, beneath the surface conflict of accents and table settings, there lay a deeper social disjunction which the new dramatists attacked and exploited. The genteel sensibility of the upper classes, at least as it was depicted on the stage, became, for writers like Osborne, Wesker, Mortimer, and even Pinter, the target for an all-out dramatic assault. To them, a detached and reticent intercourse with life was not only a snobbish rebuff of democratic enthusiasms but also an obstacle to real dramatic passion, and they exulted in displaying the rude emotional vigor of their characters and in inflicting it on that fine distillation of manners by which the upper class lived and kept a safe distance from the rest of society. In his review of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, Kenneth Tynan expressed succinctly the social and critical attitude of this new movement when, after admitting some reservations about the play’s artistic qualities, he chastised such disinterested judgments with the declaration that he doubted he could “love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.”

Since Tynan pronounced this exile of millions from his affections, class warfare has settled into an honored theatrical tradition, so that many English playwrights now seem to feel obliged, in order to establish their depth of purpose and good intentions, to pay it homage, often at the cost of seriously injuring their individual work.

Comedians, by Trevor Griffiths, is an instance of such an injury. Starting from a premise that is novel and rich with antic possibility, the play manages to scuttle itself with perfunctory, self-righteous anger. Set in Manchester, Comedians begins with a group of young men who aspire to be nightclub comics, meeting in one of those dismal cubicles of adult education. They have been for some time taking a course in the craft of comedy that a former celebrated comedian is giving in order to perpetuate his ideas on humor while he guides his students in their first efforts at a professional career. As the class assembles. it becomes clear that most of the young men are there in order to find some way to escape from their present Manchester existence rather than out of any particular calling for the craft they’re studying. They all, however, share a certain mood of desperation, which makes their tired jokes and pat routines poignant pleas for freedom as well as hilarious exercises in show-business fundamentals.

There is one student, however, who we perceive has a genuine and personal comic imagination, whose humor, at least in the classroom, goes much deeper than that of his fellow students. Among those who are simply looking for a better way to earn a living, he stands out as a real artist, and as each of the students auditions his act at a local social club for a visiting talent scout with a safe, commercial sense of humor, we wait for this prize pupil to perform in a manner that will send his provincial audience back to bingo and Comedians‘ audience into several levels of appreciative laughter.

While waiting, one is treated to a variety of ways in which a comedian can endure an agonizing death on stage, and in each of the bumbling performances, Griffith manages to present not only the comedy of ineptitude, but also the true character of the performers. The failures are painful and funny, and one believes nothing can possibly go wrong in a work that seems so closely in tune with the lives and setting it depicts. But, alas, one’s confidence is premature. The genius of the classroom comes on and proceeds to aspire to social significance. Wearing the make-up of a mime, he tries to make human contact with a pair of poshly dressed dummies that, naturally enough, remain indifferent to all his overtures of friendship and assumptions of common feeling. As he pushes his demands for some sort of acknowledgment from these upper-class effigies, his hostility mounts, and his crude cordiality changes into threatening anger. His act ends in harangue and homicide, a conclusion which, I suppose, informs one that comedy is a serious business.

After such a heavy intrusion of high purpose, it should be no surprise that the final act is mostly taken up with a fierce debate between pupil and teacher on the functions of comedy, a debate which manages to draw concentration camps and the problems of working-class solidarity into its arguments. It should also be no surprise that vitality and humor drain out of the play with each reference to the social obligations of comedy, and one can only remind oneself afterward how much of Griffith’s drama deserved a fate better than this windy and hollow conclusion.

The cast, under Mike Nichols’s direction, presents a tight ensemble performance filled with gritty details of character and setting. Jonathan Price, who plays the gifted young comic, is always in impeccable control of the bitter, ironic energy his character converts into humor until the playwright abandons him and he is forced to flounder manfully through the rhetoric of the last act. It is odd that Mike Nichols, whose early career makes him no stranger to the profession Comedians is about, and Griffith, who obviously has been close to this world himself, should have forgotten that when a comic must fall back on a “seriously-now-folks” plea to his audience, his act is in serious trouble.

____________

In his earlier play, Butley, Simon Gray offered a humorous study of a man who gets compulsively involved in the problems of others. In Otherwise Engaged, the main character, Simon, is one who by nature and design tries to avoid any unnecessary contact with the ordinary details of his friends’ and family’s daily lives. Intelligence and a delicate aesthetic sense of life’s priorities have built around him a defense that excludes all but the most discriminating forms of human contact. By birth and by inclination, he is the embodiment of the well-wrought sensibility that with polite courtesy rejects the ordinary emotions of life.

Life, of course, takes its revenge in Gray’s play. At the opening curtain, Simon is settling in to an afternoon’s listening to a new recording of Parsifal. He carefully sets the controls of his elaborate hi-fi equipment, stands in the center of the room for a moment to insure the sound is as it should be, and then settles into his sofa with the elegance of a Mandarin embarking on a long afternoon of meditation. The overture has hardly begun when Simon’s tranquility is ruptured by unexpected invasions of life’s cruder problems. First his upstairs tenant, a university student of disheveled aspect and demotic accent, bursts in to complain about his sex life and to borrow money. Then Simon’s brother, a man sunk in domestic drudgery and despair over his chances of ever becoming an assistant headmaster at a boys’ school, appears and commands Simon’s reluctant attention for a half hour or so. Next, a squabbling couple arrives; then an old school chum whom Simon has forgotten—he never can remember names or faces, which is as close as he comes to a forthright statement of his feelings about their owners’ significance—but whose girlfriend Simon has casually seduced in his office, barges in exuding menace and self-pity.

Although Simon listens to these intruders with a bemused, noblesse-oblige concern, he can’t help revealing—by affecting misunderstanding or through fastening his attention on the wrong detail of their stories—how little he cares about their desires and dilemmas. Only his old Oxford friend, a literary critic who detests the “literature racket,” earns admission into Simon’s affections, and at the play’s end, when even Simon’s wife has denounced his aristocratic attitude after challenging it unsuccessfully with a confession of a love affair, the Oxonians sit in silent friendship and communication as Wagner’s overture is finally allowed to proceed past its opening measures.

It is hard to know just what to make of Simon and his arrangement with life. The accusations hurled at him by those wounded by his manner are for the most part filled with envy of his self-sufficiency and grace. His brother is jealous of his intelligence and Oxford education; the student boarder, who borrows incessantly from him, resents the abundance of his possessions and the offhand way in which he lends them; his old school chum can’t endure the knowledge that Simon, who had led a charmed existence as a schoolboy, still shows no signs that “life has caught up with him.”

Considering most of the trivial petulance that Simon is faced with in Otherwise Engaged, he should hardly be accused of anything more than being justly discriminating in his defense of personal privacy. However, his wish to go no further than a nodding acquaintance with the daily incidents of existence is taken by most of the play’s characters—and I suspect by the author as well—as an act of snobbish sensibility, and they surround him with carping moods of resentment until he is at last forced to abandon his efforts at cordiality and admit that he indeed does find their passions and problems of small consequence. When he does so, it is as if the dummies in the Manchester comedian’s act of social insult had spoken back and informed the insistent working-class stranger on stage with them that they find his enthusiasm for football a curious reason for a spontaneous sidewalk conversation.

Otherwise Engaged is an often funny play that, in the absence of a real focusing intelligence, relies on this traditional conflict of manners and mannerisms to make it into something more than a series of light character studies. As directed by Harold Pinter and played with bemused sharpness by Tom Courtenay, Simon becomes a symbol of amiable insult to the world he inhabits, and one is left to wonder whether the charm and intelligence of the insult are worth the pain they cause and the isolation they demand.