Stage:

...It was a testimonial to the Near the end of the play, Lord Thurlow, who has just been power of the actor...

...the suffering of their patient, thinking of him abstractly as a A real moose in a made-up town: wasn't it Mary Anne Moore case and concretely as a source of income...

...GERALD WEALES 20: 5 November 1993 Commonweal...

...I found myself thinking warmly of Wallach for a talented performer...

...FRANK McCONNELL The king returns to sanity under his care, but if George is suffering from porphyria rather than madness, Willis's disSTAGE ciplinary treatment may have nothing to do with the cure...

...Madness would have pleased him...

...The doctors, each of whom has his pet treatment, are at the beginning of every installment how fictional, constructed, allies of one group or the other, and they are indifferent to and human is all that follows his initial stroll through town...

...Bennett suggests in formers tell personal and theatrical anecdotes, do scenes from a program note that George was suffering from porphyria plays in which they have appeared, recite poetry, generally rather than dementia, but, ill or mad, the king had several pe- make themselves likable...

...part of tiny clusters of characters in conversation or in confrontation with the presumably mad king...

...There is, then, The Royal National Theatre's production of Alan a tough political point at the heart of Madness, but the work Bennett's The Madness of George III is present- is more playful than dark in expressing this theme...

...Art and saints lies, who would like to see the king permanently out of his have this in common, that they don't wait for official canon- mind-and William Pitt, the prime minister, and the rest of ization to do the good stuff they do...

...As the only really "natural" thing in at least the semblance of sanity-struggle to get or to retain the whole show, that hairy and charming fellow reminds us power...

...Nigel best show in New York at the moment is the string of Botero Hawthorne gives a remarkable performance in the role, statues decorating the center strip from 54th to 61st on Park making a funny, sly, vituperative creature of the troubled Avenue...

...Although the play opens with man, being touted by his uncle for a royal appointment, who the king and his court sweeping down a great flight of stairs, is so stupid that he can only stand dazed while unanswered and ends with a similarly grand exit, it consists for the most questions float past him...

...His Majesty's Government, who would like him to display Ah, yes: the moose...

...The callousness of the doctors is a symptom of the HAWTHORNE AS GEORGE III political disease affecting most of the characters-an inability to respond sympathetically to the suffering of the king, who is for them little more than a prop, and a necessity to mask their selfishness in the platitudes of concern...

...A similar but very different introduced to King Lear by King George, tearfully recounts the testimonial can be found in In Persons, which end of the play, lamenting the deaths of Lear and Cordelia...

...I saw it at the has a taste for broad caricature that can be seen at its most Brooklyn Academy of Music in late September...

...He is, then, just another of Bennett's medical cartoons and an occasion for satire about insiders vs...

...The role Jackson as the hilarious analysand in Oh Men...

...Bennett ly on a short tour in this country...

...Going to In Persons crown is almost taken from him by the vain, preening Prince has less the feel of a theatrical evening than of a party in of Wales, but which ends with George III's return to rational- which the honored guests have been asked to perform...

...His verbal collapses are much more frightening than dress at 58th Street and the cat at 55th...

...the other is a history chronicle, which as the rambunctious Mangiacavallo in The Rose Tattoo and is in fact a satiric play about politics and medicine...

...Oh Women...

...The theatrical excerpts-particuriods of incoherence and spent his last ten years insane and in larly the bits torn out of Major Barbara-are not very efisolation...

...obvious in the tiresome figures of the doctor who constanta strategically placed reader can see it right now ly carries a chamber pot to consult the king's stool and a young at the Colonial Theater in Boston...

...of George III, which takes the character from amiable ec- Perhaps a fond forty-year-old memory was the right response centricity to logorrhea, violence, and excessive pain at the to In Persons...

...them...

...One is a vehicle thing appropriate...

...Willis, the who defined poetry as imaginary gardens with real toads in clergyman turned mind doctor, is a more ambiguous figure...

...outsiders within the proA MAD KING'S MAD DOCTORS fession...

...that we ought to sing "Happy Birthday"-or, at least, someThere are two plays at work in Madness...

...for Bennett's play...

...I particularly recommend the woman in the polka-dot king...

...For that reason, I sus- From what one heard in the lobby, playgoers pect that it would be more effective in a smaller space than the flocked to BAM more for Nigel Hawthorne than cavernous BAM...

...It celebrates Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, who have been is a tragedy, he concedes, but he would have preferred a happy partners on and off stage for almost fifty years...

...hands of the doctors who are supposed to be curing him, and It is probably not a theater critic's place to say so, but the brings him back again, is a dream part for an actor...

...This is the end of the real king's tragedy, but the story fective, and much of the staging in the tiny space at the Bennett tells is of a first collapse (1788-89), during which the Kaufman Theater is too busy or too cute...

...The two perending...

...I felt ity and power...

...I can imagine an Elizabethan nerd asking the same thing, In the political play, the Prince of Wales and his Whig alin 1592, about a piece of fluff like Much Ado...