THE BRITISH ARE HERE

...Between the two of them they all but succeed in disguising the fact that there isn't any play: I'm not talking about Shakespeare or Sophocles, there isn't even any honest-to-God melodrama on the announced level of operation...

...No more formula...

...Where did the Romans get their culture...

...My Fat Friend was even worse...

...O.K., reasonable blackout sketch in an old-time revue, total running time seven minutes...

...We come now to what I for one regard as by far the best, in some sense the only real, play of the British wave that has inundated this distant shore, David Storey's The Farm...

...The idea brought into existence all those columns and pediments around Wash-ington, the faces as decorative detail later slightly embarrassing, the American eagle as bird of choice over Ben Franklin's native turkey, and Horatio Greenough's still amazing statue of George Washington in a bath sheet, right arm raised as of one calling for cold beer...

...All of this well-made quality of the Brits invasion naturally invokes the ' memory of the most well-made playwright of them all in our time, Ter-rence Rattigan, and sure enough the master himself turned up before the first wave had completed its landings and consolidation with In Praise of Love, with Rex Harrison and Julie Harris above the title, Martin Gabel below...

...At various points, he knows she knows but doesn't know she knows he knows...

...Equus from the Old Vic...

...Montauk is an hour or so: Albee has been Anglicized...

...Once, brilliant...

...What did you see looking down from almost any air flight in the United States...

...It has to mean something that this superb work has been seen only at Washington's Folger Theatre, is not yet scheduled for New York...

...What were the two great badges and emblems of imperial Rome...

...Now departed to the country at large after good runs in Washington and New York, the play was simply a joke, one joke, prolonged into two acts...

...the casual laborers of The Contractor came together, assembled their tent, took it back down and went off apart again...

...America as imperial Rome is a later comparison, one really gaining widespread acceptance only after World War II...

...There isonly the moving about of the per-sonnae...

...That having gone bankrupt in their own, wonderful-while-it-lasted, real imperialism, the Brits are now into cultural imperialism as the ultimate way to impose English values on the English-speaking world...

...Or that we, having taken over, to a large extent, their real imperialism and run it into the ground in about one generation, as compared to the eight to ten British generations who lived very well off imperialism, have exhausted our creativity on ballistics and body-counts and now are forced to find fuel for the cultural enterprise where we may...

...Mayor Curley was right: Boston is a day closer to Europe, he used to say...

...she knows he knows but doesn't know he knows she knows...

...In the title role, John Wood has the eyebrows, the litheness, the laconic delivery of lines, the casual work with needle and fiddle, the persona, in short, of the super-Sherlock generations of fans have invented for themselves out of the frankly rather thin tales of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle...

...Those Greeks can do anything they turn their hands to...

...Again, there is neither play nor significance of any kind, only the pretense of the evocation of mythic bonds between man and horse, centaurs and cowboys, and a lot of first-rate stagecraft that ought to be put to better uses...

...The play is actually the amalgamation of two one-acters, neither of which has much to recommend it by itself, both of which together make things less rather than more...

...The prodigal son returns to the family farm in the North Country, is assaulted in turn by all, especially by the father, and goes off without ever introducing his fiancee, if such indeed there was, waiting in the village hotel...

...the Royal Shakespeare's London Assurance...

...If Sherlock is the grandfather of the English invasion this season, the same company's London Assurance by Dion Bouccicault (who received the tiniest type possible on the title page , of the program) is the great grand-daddy...

...The Farm is all by itself...

...The stranger returns and turns out to have been attracted actually by all the avoirdupois, repelled by the slavishly attained skin-and-bones...

...The central story is one of non-communication: the crusty middle-aged critic, Harrison, is well aware that his somewhat younger wife, Harris, is dying of some mysterious disease brought on by undernourishment in her formative years spent in a concentration camp, but in order not to alarm her, he isn't letting on and instead is carrying on in his familiar, self-centered, egoistic, revolting, churlish manner...

...Baths and roads...

...The joke was about a fat quasi-intellectual bookstore owner who allowed her fag friend to talk her into reducing drastically in order to fasten to her with hoops of steel the passing stranger strangely attracted to her...

...Back to us Romans and our Greeks...

...There is much to be said for both hypotheses...

...twice, at least a little suspect of formularization...

...The National Health...

...In Praise of Love with Rex Harrison and Julie Harris...

...But the probing into the boy's motives by an emotionally shrunken shrink is less than meaningless...

...Absurd Person Singular...

...But a play...

...Finally, it is not altogether fanciful to claim that America's leading younger playwright, Edward Albee-younger than Miller and Williams, that is-has himself been affected by the British surface professionalism...

...and so on through half the laws of permutations and combinations and the main point is that if all performances were only matinees, Harrison could pack them in forever...

...The grandfather of the lot is Sherlock Holmes...

...and, probably the best of the lot, David Storey's The Farm, yet to be seen on or even booked for Broadway...

...Names: My Fat Friend, with Lynn Redgrave...

...Blue rectangles signifying swimming pools and white ribbons signifying superhighways...

...The notion of America as Rome has been around since the founding of the Republic, when, of course, it was the Roman Republic, its probity and determination, that served as model...

...A mid-Victorian imitation of an 18th century play-not Restoration -the piece survives only by virtue of the brilliant direction and acting of the Royal Shakespeare crowd...

...Seascape, is brilliantly produced, brilliantly directed by the author, brilliantly played by Deborah Kerr and Barry Nelson as the vaguely discontented aging couple on the beach somewhere in the Hamptons...

...The production isn't camp...

...There are others and will be more...

...Frank Langella and Maureen Anderman as a pair of hu-manoid-sea lizards who escape from the sea for a couple of hours of chitchat in which nothing is ventured, nothing gained, nothing lost, nothing saved...

...It is not only an actor's play but a ham actor's play and indeed the play of the worst kind of ham actor, the underplaying ham actor, which Wood is par excellence and which Gillette to some extent actually created, or at least re-created...

...it manages miraculously to straddle the essentially antagonistic confrontation between mid-19th and mid-18th centuries and thus to compel our momentary belief in something-plots within plots about marriages and inheritances-not really worth considering whether we believe it or not...

...The play ends in a breakfast-coda in which those still on the farm celebrate their hostile togetherness with a rekindled warmth that is more chilling than the North Sea winds of Yorkshire...

...Well, first they crushed the native Mediterranean variant, that of the Etruscans, and then they imported the high class stuff, the Greek...

...From troops posted all over the known world to Nixon's palace guard with their specially designed suits, everywhere you looked, there was Rome in its Octavian to Romulus Augustulus period...

...His latest...

...It is just about everything the Baker Street Irregulars expect of their mythic demi-god...

...First we allowed the native American to wither on the Broadway vine and then, to keep Broadway alive, we established a direct line to the West End of London, whence, often with a pause in Romanized Washington, the best or the most popular plays of the "American" theater have been coming for some years now and never more than this one...

...Once more, pure professionalism has made something out of nothing...

...The actual inventor was the actor-playwright William Gillette and he had strictly his own ends as an actor in view when he wrote the script he was to play for 30 years...

...In that post-war-cold-war period which, cross your fingers, we may just be at the end of, America took over all the traditional imperial appurtenances with none of the imperial profits...

...They've forgotten where the grapes grow and if they found them wouldn't really need them for the things they do best and that we, for our part, best appreciate and voyage over to fill our stages...

...There are exceptions which will dealt with presently, but the first two things to be said about the bulk of the England-Made-Me imports is that they are marvelously produced, acted, directed, staged, and, that beneath all the theatrical expertise, there is usually very little indeed worth being all that expert about...

...There is even more to be said for a more obvious one, namely that the British have become our Greeks, supplying us with theatrical pieces the way the original Greeks supplied the Romans with pottery pieces...

...The stage work is fantastic, from the nude scene to, especially, the stylized horses played by mimes with silvery open work horses' heads and hooves...

...both groups hacked their way through North Country dialect toward a hatful of subtle insights into their own relationships, conditions and probable fates...

...the Royal Shakespeare's Sherlock Holmes...

...A year or so ago, Storey seemed to be falling into an easy, "well-made" pattern of his own: the football players of The Changing Room came together, played their game, went off apart again...

...Pure professionalism is at its purest in Equus, an empty, pretentious play about a stable-boy who blinds a number of his charger-charges after they have seen him rolling about in the hay with a neighborhood filly...

...They can give the basic, hanging amphora a pedestal to stand on, can turn its lip, flute its sides, elaborate handles, turn black-figure inside out to make red-figure, reduce the Odyssey to decorative groups, do anything, truly, with that venerable vessel except fill it with life-giving, eye-gladdening, heart-warming wine...

...And ourselves...

...Philip Locke as Professor Moriarity is the perfect foil: ham well done...