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MARSHALL COHEN
cheese-roll and is revenged for the loss of a wife. Lenny demands Ruth's
glass of water and is served with the superb sexual threat,
"If
you take
it, I'll take you." This is the play's peripety and we are never again in
doubt that Ruth, who looked to be another Pinter victim, will emerge
ultimately as the victor.
The play is given an astonishingly skillful performance by the Royal
Shakespeare Cpmpany. Peter Hall's direction is as subtle as it is self–
effacing. This last is a rare quality, indeed, in a theater dominated by
such flamboyantly self-indulgent directors as Guthrie, Zeffirelli and
Peter Brook. A slightly greater shift toward the nonrepresentational,
particularly in the performances of Paul Rogers and Ian Holm, might
have prevented the Broadway critics from demanding to know why a
midwestern faculty wife would abandon her family for a life of prosti–
tution in North London. Better yet, why don't they ask one?
Pinter has assimilated the influence of Beckett and Ionesco so com–
pletely that his plays seem as English as Shakespeare's. They may,
in
fact, be regarded as elaborate fantasias on English working-class themes
and, in particular, on English working-class diction.
(As
Jonathan Miller
suggests, the entire post-Suez renaissance of English drama, from the
Brechtian revivals of Shakespeare's history plays to the "absurdist"
dramas of Pinter, may be understood as a proud celebration of English
national consciousness.) Albee, by contrast, has never quite succeeded
in domesticating his European sources and, if he frees himself from one
influence, it is only to subject himself to another. The Ionesco family of
The American Dream
gives way to the Strindberg family of
Virginia
Woolt
and it, in turn, is succeeded by the Eliot family of
A Delicate
Balance.
Still, Albee has often managed to endow his European originals
with an American significance and even with a local accent. Mommy
and Daddy's baby-talk, and their euphemisms, may derive from the
French copybook cliches of
The Bald Soprano,
but their brutalities betray
a peculiarly American dream. George and Martha may be involved in
a Strindbergian Dance of Death, but their very names, those of the
First President and his Lady, suggest the collapse of distinctively Ameri–
can ideals. On occasion Albee has also managed to invest his models with
an immediate personal significance. "The American Dream" is a self–
pitying orphan, and George and Martha may be regarded as a barren
homosexual couple. Albee writes, then, and with power, of the man
without origins, or hope of issue. The Eliot family of
A Delicate
Balance
does not, however, adapt at all well to the new environment
and constantly betrays its past. The well-appointed home in an
American suburb remains an English country house; half the characters
