THE STAGE

...What these films have in common is not only the disjointed, relativistic quality of the world depicted in them, but Resnais's ability to get such a contradictory, protean world to make sense in the end...

...Still, as the Elizabeth Ray: story showed us, the matter is not that simple...

...Hiroshima begins with a prologue film, anothel Night and Fog really, about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan...

...More high school dropouts will be airlifted from England to secure temporary employment with the Royal Rifles or whatever, guarding people as deprived as themselves in the Shankill and the Bogside...

...There is a great deal of rather tiresome business in which lace panties, on and off the secretary, are displayed to the appreciative audience...

...Since all Resnais's films have created a mental reality in lieu of a concrete one, we seem to be on accustomed ground in Providence...

...The only difference is that we are in a corridor of trees this time rather than a hotel corridor, and the entwined branches are real instead of being plaster and gilt ornamentation on a baroque ceiling...

...Within a couple of reels we have become aware that what we are seeing is only Clive's thoughts about his sons, never the sons themselves...

...And the "damnable question" will remain just that...

...It is amusingly performed and, as one would expect from Stoppard, it is often funny, but it is about as insubstantial as an occasional piece can be...

...Jefferson advised us, "Justice cannot sleep forever...

...Much of the incidental humor is relentlessly local, as alien to an American audience as the details of Ed Berman's life...

...The interval I mentioned above is not an intermission, but an interlude, New-Found-Land...

...In effect all the earlier films mentioned before have been about memory and the relationship of past to present...

...One o[ them, which may be said to have thematic relevance to the play as a whole, is a reminiscence by an aged~civil servant of how he once won a bet from Lloyd George, an anecdote which, although he does not know it, recounts an occasion on which Lloyd George knew his mother (how did Stoppard pass up a joke as obvious as that...

...Muriel plays off two pairs of lovers and past and present in a similar fashion when a middle-class woman suddenly gets as a house guest an old lover hoping to renew his relationship with her...

...for instance, one extended scene depends for its laughs on the differences among 1he London daily papers...

...The film begins with the same shot as Last Year at Marienbad, a tracking shot down a shadowy corridor with the camera low and looking up at what passes overhead...

...enough opening and closing doors to suggest that Stoppard has sat at the feet of the authors of Move Over, Mrs...

...whom she converts in the interval...

...MESSAGE, FARCE & HOME MOVIE 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE STAGE The sophisticated New Yorker, that rare and wondrous beast, would not be caught dead watching a friend's home movies, but hang the name Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut on the footage and he would be in line immediately waiting to pay inflated prices for a chance to share an essentially private experience...

...as a citizen and, in effect, tells press and public alike to buzz off...

...Increasing numbers of the haves will learn the advantages of banking by mail...

...For in all Resnais's greatest films---Hiroshima Mon Amour, Marienbad and Muriel--the mental reality with which we are ultimately dealing, the one that holds the film together and gives meaning to all the others, is Resnais's own...

...The tracking camera soon arrives at the house of Clive Langham (John Gielgud), a novelist who is up all night at the mercy of his aging body and mulling over the lives of his sons (Dirk Bogarde and David Warner) whom he is trying to turn into characters in a novel...

...In it, two Home Office officials consider whether or not Berman (who is never named in the play) should be granted English citizenship, but the chief business of the sketch is to give each of the actors a long monologue...

...On to Broadway, then, and a small play written for a small theater had puffed up like a pouter pigeon and come to roost in a Broadway house as though it were a major Stoppard effort, like Jumpers or Travesties...

...When Ed Berman, the American-born director, playwright and adventurer in urban social experiments, became an English citizen last year, Tom Stoppard wrote a play (or two plays, depending on whether or not one italicizes the ampersand) in honor of the occasion...

...The other set piece is a lyric travelogue which carries speaker and audience across a U.S...

...That is the only way to explain the success of Tom Stoppard's Dirty Linen & New-Found-Land, the celebratory farce now playing at the John Golden...

...Stoppard has already written several plays, of which A]ter Magritte is best known here, for Inter-Action Trust, the communal group which Ed Berman helped form to investigate the social uses of theater...

...Dirty Linen appears to be a harmless romp, liberal in spirit and light in delivery, but with a simple shift in the nature of the scandal involved it might serve as amicus curiae to Tip O'Neill's defense of Representative Robert L. F. Sikes...

...It is an attractive idea in a time when the right to privacy seems to be getting trampled underfoot by an endless guided tour through the bedrooms of the nation...

...The morning of the Drogheda rally, for example, sixteen shops in Derry were fire-bombed and a hundred people added to the ranks of the unemployed...

...Ironically enough, they can anticipate aid from other haves who will grudgingly make concessions, political and otherwise, simply because they have grown weary of ducking bombsplinters and submitting to body searches on their way to the bank...

...It argues, through its sex symbol as sage, that the public does not care what its government officials do with their private lives and that journalists, who write only for other newspapermen, care about scandal only as a subject...

...It declares the rights of the M.P...

...Dirty Linen presents a Parliamentary committee meeting ostensibly investigating a monumental scandal in which more than a hundred members of Parliament are assumed to have indulged in hanky-panky with a mysterious titian-haired beauty...

...I may not care what my elected representative does with his spare time, but I hate being asked to pay for it...

...The obvious joke is that the incompetent secretary is the woman in question and thatmas the English would say she has had it off with all the committee members, male and female, except for one priggish M.P...

...The substitution of one kind of foliage for another indicates that the seeming allusion to Resnais's past work is quite intentionat here, and the general strategy of the film, like much of its imagery, gives usa feeling of dd]d vu as well...

...and from there it proceeds to a story in which the affair that a French woman has with a Japanese man is deflected by memories it arouses of an earlier love affair she had with a German soldier during World War II...

...Markham and No Sex Please-We're British...

...yet an occasional piece by Neil Simon or Stephen Sondheim, properly dressed, set and performed, would send him running to the theater...

...It was presumably the publie side of Stoppard's play, the farce about sex scandal in high places, that made it attractive to the Kennedy Center, which brought it to Washington in time to ride the wake of the Elizabeth Ray confessions...

...Here as in earlier work, Resnais has fractured his story line like a nut in order to get at the interior qualities of human experience...

...seen only through its popular songs, movies, novels, an oddly affectionate nod to Berman's fictional country of origin...

...In Providence, on the other hand, the mind with which we are ultimately dealing is not Resnais's, but Clive Langham's...

...GERALD WEALES THE WAVE OF THE PAST 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN From the very start Providence seems to involve us in that same illusory demimonde where all Alain Resnais's past work has taken place...

...In the interim, the have-nots will continue to beat each other up...

...The violence, in turn, will increase their own numbers...

...Night and Fog becomes not a documentary about the camps so much as a meditation on them, a film on the difficulty of thinking about certain events rather than on the events themselves---a film about memory rather than actuality...

...much verbal knockabout in which sexual innuendo is used to malaprop up government jargon...

...The main message of Dirty Linen can be found in the committee report, drafted by the secretary, which brings the play to a triumphant end...

...There is a difference between sex and sex at public expense...

...18 March 1977:180 In insisting on the essential triviality of Dirty Linen, I do not want to suggest--as some reviewers have-that it is simply a playful gambol...

...When Dirty Linen & New-Found-Land was performed at InterAction's Almost Free Theatre, the oblique references to Berman's enterprises--the publishing house, the city farm, the Fun Art Bus---must have delighted the audience of friends and well-wishers...

...Some of the comments I heard from Indiana relatives about the Carter interview in Playboy suggest that the first point is debatable, in the United States at least, but the second appeals to me--has, in fact, since I read Geoffrey Wolff's "I Scoop, Therefore I Am," in the November, 1975, More...

...The way in which Resnais's own mind had to provide the context for events was clear even in his early documentary about the concentration camps, Night and Fog...

...Although much of the film is stock footage of the camps made by the Nazis themselves, the only continuity for either the film or the experiences it depicts is provided by Resnais's own rumination...

...Even if New York playgoers read the article by the editor-in-chief of Playbill and pick up the proper clues, the jokes are secondhand, the sense of occasion lost as it would be if you had to explain the reference to the missing sachet in your Cousin Maude pageant...

...At one point, for instance, a tracking shot that Resnais made in color along an overgrown railway line at the now abandoned site of a camp cuts away to a black and white shot along a rail line in use at a camp years earlier, crowded with boxcars full of inmates and pacing SS men...

...Tell him that you have written a pageant in honor of your Cousin Maude's eighty-fifth birthday and he will have to leave town on business...

...It is a farce with a message---perhaps several...

...In place of the orderliness of conventional reality, he imposed an order all Commonweal: 181...

...But, as our own Mr...

...Thus, at the same time we move through space with this tracking shot, we move through time and back into the past as well...

...Yet at the same time there is a certain unfamiliarity here apparent even in the cursory description of the film above and increasingly distressing as Providence continues...

...Since the pretentious use of foreign phrases and the idiotic naming of restaurants is as American as it is British, some of the verbal games, however attenuated, are easily assimilated...