THE THEATER ON TELEVISION:

...Professional groups in Washington, New York, Rhode Island, San Francisco, New Haven and elsewhere provide this season's fare...

...So frivolous on the stage, both American and English, on the tube the Brits are the soul of seriousness, high purpose and superb performance not for its own sake but for the sake of dramatic reality...

...That audience is the television audience and public television particularly is creating the audience, the repertory and the whole slowly developing language of the medium, a language combining the grammar, syntax and vocabulary of those of stage, screen and living-room entertainment...

...The writing, of course, is infinitely superior to soap opera...

...Public television reassembles the audience Broadway has lost: actually, PBS creates that national audience for the first time with a truly national theater, one that exists all over the place and with a widely varied taste, taking its unity only in a dedication to theatrical excellence...

...Those latter things and others like them are indeed settled for and to great advantage by the PBS theater venture from the opposite end of the country, "Theater in America" from New York's WNET...

...such, too, was the quite unexpected "Steambath," with God as a Puerto Rican bath attendant and the clientele finding themselves sheeted and steaming much as, two generations ago, a similar clientele found themselves "Outward Bound" on Charon's greyhound of the North Atlantic...

...Upstairs Downstairs" is generally criticized as high-class soap opera, but it is no such thing...

...Jean Marsh, in whirlwind taping tours, has proved the most reliable hawker of memberships in public television...

...One of the few flaws in versimilitude was the use of "Cuba" for "Cuber" in the White House...

...Upstairs Downstairs" is entirely different...

...The best known of the British-PBS productions is surely "Upstairs Downstairs," presented by the Masterpiece frank GETLEIN is critic-at-large of the Washington Star News...

...It is this kind of dramatic sensitivity that illumined every point of the Royal Shakespeare Company production...

...The Young Vic's Scapino or Joe Papp's Two dents depends to a very great extent on theatricality, on interplay between players and audience, on the...

...people fade away to be replaced by others...

...The whole point of soap opera is that it never ends...

...One message is that that's where theater in America is now: all over the place...

...Then a couple of unemployed British actresses—Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins—asked themselves why they didn't have a television series to fall back on when times were bad, realized that they both came from families "in service" and the rest is history...

...The whole thing catches a society in a period of profound change and watches the change take place...

...What is really happening in the play is that Octavius is transforming himself from Caesar to Augustus and Antony and Cleopatra get in the way...

...There is indeed an experience of theater as distinct from that of drama...

...The Calley show was the opposite in a sense, a dramatic failure because most of the important drama was happening off-stage, not at the trial at Fort Benning of the lieutenant at the bottom of the buck-stops-here ladder...

...It is a commonplace of movie history that plays do not make good movies: they are physically static, claustrophobic in setting, loggerhead in dialogue, all characteristics working against any definition of movies ever proposed by anyone except Andy Warhol, who is, to put it charitably, a special case...

...The "Antony and Cleopatra" was presented by ABC, which seems to be trying to become the quality network on the grounds that it hasn't the money to be bad enough to grab the ratings...

...The program did more than hint at what had to have happened offstage—at various headquarters in Vietnam, at the Pentagon—but it was offstage and only the Greeks can get away with keeping so much of the action out of sight...

...It has all too often been treated as a set-piece and indeed it is worth hearing as such...

...The form began for ABC with the "Pueblo" story, opened this season with "The Missiles of October" and most recently has done "Judgment: The Court-Martial of Lt...

...Hollywood Television Theater is invariably expertly produced and beautifully acted, but it clicks only about half the time and this margin of failure seems to be directly related to the dominant taste—which must be that of the show's executive producer, Norman Lloyd, for significant dramas that tackle the ultimate questions about life and death and where do we go from here and would it be worth it after all and so on and so on...

...Theater of Fact'" is an interesting idea that if it hasn't quite hit a stride yet, that's the fault more of the material it has been trying to tackle than of the quality of work which has been excellent in most particulars...

...The plays, the players and the productions are endlessly varied because the series is in effect a continuing survey of what used to be called regional or little theater and what we don't really have an up-to-date name for...

...In the title parts, Richard Johnson and Janet Suzman were magnificent, she mistress of survival as an art form, amusedly tolerant of Antony's passion, he torn between his own imperial ambitions and the temptations of the Orient and of personal fulfillment...

...The show successfully recreated the day-by-day drama we all lived through, at least in Washington, during the long-distance confrontation over Russian missiles in Cuba...

...There have been few if any "throwaway" chapters of "Upstairs Downstairs," installments presented only because they were fun to write, to act and, for that matter, to watch...

...As Enobarbus, Patrick Stewart gave the lines all they demand but he also—and, of course, the director, Jon Scofield—kept them within the dramatic frame...

...By the end of the play they are dead and the transformation is complete...

...Such was its production of "The Lady's Not For Burning," with Richard Chamberlain and Eileen Atkins...

...Theater out of Boston...

...There are books on each of the principal characters...

...fact of there being an audience as a collective...

...Is television theater at all, however, the question may well be raised and the answer would have to be, it depends...

...there have been references to them in New Yorker cartoons...

...The play moved fluidly and naturally around the old barn of a country house...

...As in the original, it was only after it was all over that one reflected it made such acceptable drama because it was such appalling conduct of foreign policy...

...The first time drama presented itself to me as a strong possibility on television was, I must confess, not on television at all, but in the Russian movie of a few years ago of Uncle Vanya...

...At least as often, however, Lloyd or whoever does the picking comes up with a bomb, such as this season's "Chinese Ambassador" with the wasted crystal talents of Judith Anderson and, more lately, the unspeakable "For the Use of the Hall," redeemed only by the appearance of Aline MacMahon, who provided, out of her head and heart, not the script, the one note of dignity and intelligence the play had...

...Television, however, is different from movies in a number of important ways, despite the fact that week in, week out, the best shows on most commercial channels are likely to be old or new movies...

...very little actual dramatic ground is covered in any single installment...

...In between, we followed the play very closely...

...This is almost entirely due to Public Television and to the British...

...It is tempting to speculate that something about Los Angeles and Hollywood brings on such ambitions to scale the heights of universal significance and never settle for such mundane stories as those of salesmen at the end of the road, blacks trying to work out of the ghetto, Irish coping with civil war or Russians contemplating the approach of apocalypse...

...Many plays do not have such a dependence...

...ABC has also been responsible for the burgeoning of its own self-styled 'Theater of Fact," which, as the name implies, goes back to the WPA's "Living Newspaper" for its ancestry, with a stop along the way at early television drama out of the week's news...

...the one that begins 'The barge she sat in" and climaxes in "Age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety...

...This was in flagrant contradiction of every manual of the movies ever written, yet the thing worked with all the power and pathos of Chekhov...

...Vanya came across as play rather than as movie, but it also came across as something else and what that something else has turned out to be is television drama...

...We are made to watch Agrip-pa throughout the speech because as he watches Enobarbus he realizes that his patched-up truce between Antony and Octavius will not last...

...The production made this movement entirely clear...

...About half the time, the program gets a play of this kind that works and everything is marvelous...

...Calley...

...Octavius is thus seen as using the surviving Republican virtues—sobriety, prudence, hard work and so on—to wrap up the Republic, while Antony's oriental decadence anticipates what the emerging empire shall become...

...Shakespeare is language in action...

...It was able to do this because the camera—or the cameras, actually—moved easily and without calling attention to themselves through the house, zooming in unostentatiously for close-ups, panning around a room, catching reaction shots, all without disturbing the flow of the drama, let alone chopping it up and remaking it as film, in the traditional treatment of plays on screen...

...They play, essentially as movies do, to each individual member of the audience, or to groups of two or three or four, in short to the family-sized audience, not the auditorium-sized one...

...Everything has paid its way...

...It restored, even emphasized, the vital political aspect of the play...

...The best speech in the play, one of the best in Shakespeare, is that of Antony's lieutenant, Enobarbus...

...Upstairs Downstairs" has been running ever since, with this season's 13 installments just over and just about due for a first re-run...

...The missile show recreated the whole Kennedy court as well as the Kremlin crowd of Howard da Sylva's Khrushchev...

...The Brits are also responsible for the best we've had this season in theater on the commercial networks...

...Octavius and the Romans are dressed, for instance, in sober, puritanical white, as opposed to the rich oriental stuffs Antony finds everywhere around him in Egypt...

...There was no movie effort to "open up" the play except under the titles at beginning and end...

...The Royal Shakespeare's reading may have been the definitive one for our time...

...dialogue is incredibly slow...

...A frequent contributor in the past, he now writes a regular column in these pages...

...Then it got into Dorothy Say-ers, of whose works it has done three or four, though so far none of what are regarded as her "masterpieces" of the mystery genre, such as "The Nine Tailors...

...It rescued the play from its long history as a tale of star-crossed lovers and the world well lost for love...

...The show got its name from a whole series of dramatizations the BBC did of great novels, mostly 19th and early 20th century, ranging from Henry James to Wilkie Collins...

...This, of course, was the brilliant production of "Antony and Cleopatra" by the Royal Shakespeare Company, better known on the American stage this year for such bonbons as "Sherlock Holmes" and "The London Assurance...

...Each 50-minute or so installment is an actual drama with a beginning, middle and end...

...nothing is ever resolved...

...PBS remains the great source of drama on the tube, with two principal vehicles, Hollywood Television Theater and Theater in America...

...All of this from the mise-en-scine— beautifully done with no real sets, just lights and fabrics and marvelous props —but however good it is, mise-en-scene remains only that...

...Those differences, it seems to me, add up to television as possibly the best thing to happen to drama—if not the theater—since the fireproof stage curtain...