FEAR OF LYING
Weales, Gerald
Stage FEAR OF LYING BETRAYAL AS A WAY OF LIFE AT THE END of the play on the night I saw Pack of Lies, the man behind me turned to the woman with him and quoted E.M. Forster's line about hoping he...
...It took this play all evening, he added with a note of weary dismissal, to say what Forster got into a single sentence...
...As written and as played by Dana Ivey, there is something false about all this conviviality...
...Had he been one of those rumpled, ruined agents that recent fiction has taught us to expect in British spy stories, his behavior would have reflected institutional rather than personal indifference to the people he was using...
...Impressed, that is, until I belatedly got around to the Sunday Times (February 10) and discovered that Fox Butterfield had used the Forster remark as the lead to his piece on Pack of Lies...
...Pack of Lies is disquieting, partly for what it has to say, even more for the promises it fails to keep...
...If the audience does not believe that, Barbara is betraying nothing but her sense of her own half of a friendship...
...The lie at the heart of the pack is the cover of the nice Canadian couple, who are not Canadian, the Krogers, whose name is not Kroger — the ordinariness that allows the book dealer and his "dizzy Lizzie" of a wife to become the best friends of the even more conventional Jacksons...
...Forster's line about hoping he would have the courage to betray his country if it came to a choice between that and betraying a friend...
...I may be oversubtle in suggesting that the most important lie in the play is the one the Jacksons have been living all along: the ineffectual man seems to be head of the household and the strong woman plays the helpmate...
...She comes to believe that there is no difference between her betrayal of Helen and what the Krogers have done, between Stewart's lies and the Krogers' facade...
...There are even the little lies of Thelma, one of the operatives, who will not tell her boss about the unauthorized sausages Barbara gives her for lunch, and of the Jackson daughter, who in predictable teenage fashion pretends that she has kept her promise not to ride on her young man's motor bike...
...Perhaps Whitemore is sending a signal to the audience that Barbara Jackson cannot see...
...Whitemore's play, based on a real case, is about an ordinary English suburban couple who reluctantly allow British intelligence to use their house as a base from which to watch and eventually arrest the people acros&the street, members of a Russian spy ring...
...That fiction is exploded as Bob's inability, to assert himself afflicts Barbara as much as does Stewart's fastidious assertion of power...
...Despite its weaknesses, however, it is more complex than the man behind me suggested when he borrowed Forster from Butterfield to dazzle his companion...
...I did not share the implied criticism of the play nor the assumption that an apothegm and a play could not in their various ways make the same point, but I was impressed with his neat summation of one of Hugh White-more's themes...
...Perhaps he simply intends Helen to be the kind of character whose genuine excess looks fake against the restraint of its surroundings...
...His lies would have been less malevolent and probably more painful...
...The Jacksons, mar-velously played by Rosemary Harris and George N. Martin, would be a fascinating couple under any circumstances...
...Whitemore is a dramatist who makes everything explicit (there are speeches directly to the audience to fill in blanks that are not really empty...
...GERALD WEALES Commonweal: 182...
...The emotional line of the play is the disintegration of Barbara Jackson...
...Lies fan out from that central lie to cover the whole play...
...She loses control of herself as she sees her family's presumably open and direct life disappearing under the pressure of a house invaded...
...To get the most out of the character (and that surely is the intention of the drunken Christmas scene), Helen's lie should be her spy role, her truth the friend-aunt-neighbor in her...
...Stewart, the man from M15, insinuates his way into the Jackson household, using the lie of partial truth, involving the Jacksons more and more deeply in an operation of which they do not approve...
...I had seen Nagle Jackson's tedious Faustian pastiche in Princeton a few days before going to Pack of Lies and, although Patrick McGoohan's Stewart is a great deal more effective than Barry Boys's Mephistopheles was in Faustus in Hell, the family 22 March 1985: 181 resemblance was close enough to rob Stewart of the kind of complexity that might have enriched the play...
...The woman seemed impressed, so I doubt the man cared that Whitemore's protagonist was also telling him that pretending and withholding are also forms of lying...
...here they are human strength that almost rescues the play from its tendency toward ideation and demonstration...
...Helen Kroger is outgoing, noisy, mildly foul-mouthed, and pushily affectionate, presumably very fond of Barbara and her daughter...
...The life of the Jacksons, particularly Barbara, who must deal on a chatty, neighborly basis with Helen Kroger, becomes as much a cover as that of the Krogers...
...It is not simply that Stewart is icily articulate, careful, apparently unfeeling — a self-protective mask dictated by his trade — but, as his first speech indicates, he is condescending toward the Jacksons, his politeness almost a form of contempt...
...Whether or not that is intentional, I do not know...
...when she shouts that she can never believe the girl again, the subtext shouts that she knows she can never be believed again...
...There are flaws in the play, of which the characters of Helen and Stewart are the most damaging...
...It is appropriate that her first real explosion is aimed at her daughter...
Vol. 112 • March 1985 • No. 6
