Stage

...In the first act, about to have sex with his beloved, he sees out the window the arrival of a poet he admires, and he and Marigold quickly dress and go to enlist the man's support for the magazine they are about to establish...

...As the play progresses, Thorne goes out into the post-Cambridge world where he tries and fails to keep his magazine alive in a society which has a taste for the imperfect, the compromised, the flashy...

...The audiences that have taken to the play are probably lesponding to the sadness of it all, seeing in Thorne and company an image of their own fall from youthful grace...

...Her acquiescence at the beginning is an indication of how she will make herself secondary and supportive to Thorne even to the extent of aborting the child she wants...

...Thome's borrowing of that title for his journal — with Leavis's admonitory blessing — is presumably an indication that his is a sincere quest for excellence...

...Thorne loses not only his magazine but the wife that he at last recognizes as dearer to...

...Not only does the non-sex act prepare us for the part Thorne will play, but it does the same for Marigold...

...He is the magazine...

...It is easy to watch them go through their paces and to listen to them, although their articulateness never seems to me the wit for which Gray is often praised...

...As with Marigold, so with the other characters...

...Thev outspoken, somewhat distant perfectionist turns out to be capable only of denigration, even of those he admires, and his motivation, occasioned by his homosexuality, is the self-hatred that leads him to court the rough trade that finally kills him...

...Declining to become chairman of the English Association, James explained, "I believe only in absolutely independent, individual and lonely virtue, and in the serenely unsociable (or if need be at a pinch sulky and sullen) practice of the same...

...His friends, who try to help or to protect him, are not involved in a shared editorial task but are endeavoring to keep alive the image of Thorne as an ideal, an intellectual — perhaps spiritual — will-o'-the-wisp they follow as they stumble through the swamp of everyday existence...

...Poor Thorne, being a character in a play, has no such offstage support...

...Leavis, I suspect, would see it for the soap opera it is, the sentimental manipulation of shallowly conceived characters to make the obvious point that time takes the shine off people and shows them up for what they have always been...

...The flatness of character and performance is underlined by the presence of Michael Countryman as Musgrove...

...For either or both these goals, as the uncompleted sex act indicates, he is willing to put aside not the consolations of the flesh (he and Marigold will get to bed) but the sense of closeness between one person and another...

...Simon Gray has said how much he hated Cambridge and that Leavis was one of the few oases in a professorial desert, but the playwright's use of The Common Pursuit is surely ironic...

...Musgrove, who is in love with Thorne and Marigold and the whole enterprise, wants only to be of service, and finally — after it appears that Thorne is suffering from belated symbolic sterility — he services Marigold and gives her the child she wants...

...That is apparently not what Gray has in mind...

...Although he is at the center of the group which formed around him at Cambridge, there is no indication that his pursuit is a common one...

...GERALD WEALES 16 January 1987: 19...

...There is, however, a certain confusion between his desire to put out a good magazine and his ambition to establish himself as a literary eminence (like Leavis at Scrutiny...

...The gossipy clqwn becomes a gossipy clownish literary host on television...

...Watching Countryman at work makes one wish that Gray, in redoing The Common Pursuit for this production, had gone for complexity rather than the gloss that spells success in New York...

...The glib history student becomes the even glibber professor, turning out coffee table books while he continues his own pursuit — of sex, not literary excellence...

...I have not heard much of that since Butley, and it is fifteen years since that play's self-pitying phrasemaker gave Gray the reputation that he carries into each new production...

...Coitus interruptus as a sign of intellectual vigor...

...Even Leavis, who rather gloried in being attacked as a "cold intellectual," has his volumes of criticism to give substance to his sense of rectitude...

...When Thorne at last gives up the journal and turns biographer, he discovers that his subject — offstage poet of the first scene — is not a very nice man...

...Since the play begins and ends with undergraduate characters gathering to plan the dream magazine, and shows in between what the next twenty years make of them, it looks like another Big Chill exercise in youthful promise unfulfilled, youthful idealism tarnished...

...The performances at the Promenade are, for the most part, efficient evocations of Gray's characters, but the judgment is negative criticism masked as praise...

...All that we have to establish his superiority is what he says and does on stage and the way the other characters react to him...

...He manages to suggest a depth in the character, a combination of awkwardness, uncertainty, amiability, selfconfidence, and acquisitiveness (for people not things), that carries him far beyond the stereotypical demands of the play...

...James's words might well be used to describe Stuart Thome, Gray's protagonist, but 18: Commonweal James, unlike Thorne, has a string of fine novels to bulwark his position...

...Leavis in his turn, as he explains in his preface, borrowed the title from T. S. Eliot's "The Function of Criticism," in which Eliot defines "common pursuit of true judgment" as shared activity...

...On the assumption that the word "common" might be misconstrued, and certainly intent on not having his judgmental pursuit confused with the kind of critical consensus he mocks in his comments on Horizon in "The Progress of Poesy," Leavis chooses an epigraph from Henry James...

...The seeds of what the characters become are carefully planted in the first scene...

...What are we to make of this...

...Its success, I assume, has nothing to do with F. R. Leavis, whose 1952 collection of essays is the source of the play's title and the name of the journal founded by the Cambridge undergraduates whose growing pains the play chronicles...

...him than The Common Pursuit...

...He never makes the jump to himself...