Screen

...Enter Cecil Parker...

...I once saw her vie with Joan Plowright for eccentricity honors in a production of The Way of the World in London...

...Go to Lettice & Lovage just for the fun of it...

...Anyone who, like me, enjoys the high-tech classiness of the new Lloyds of London building or likes to wander through the National Theatre complex is likely to distrust Prince Charles and to find the final joke of Lettice & Lovage not as funny as it seems to think it is...

...For me, Plowright won because she played Lady Wishfort and, however outrageous the actress became, she remained in character...

...she spoke briskly, brusquely, direct and head-on while Smith's voice went high or low, scurried to wherever the laugh lay...

...Although Lettice has moments of distress, the play is hardly a heartbreaking comedy like Bed Among the Lentils, in which Smith was so marvelous on PBS...

...Most of the film, whose name escapes me as I write this, had to do with intrepid adventures at sea, but there were brief cuts back to England in which Charles Laughton, as the admiral in charge of operations, chewed scenery with such grandeur that I doubted that anything even a battle at sea could upstage him...

...Parker, as a foreign office type, had one scene with Laughton and, knowing what he was up against, Parker exaggerated the official Englishmen he often played...

...If we were to take the final project seriously, the play could be seen as an advocate of the Prince Charles school of architectural criticism...

...When Tyzack finally appeared at the end of act 1, she quickly established that this was her stage too...

...Shaffer seems to want to maneuver his play into making a statement of some kind, an attempt that makes the third act so much flatter than the first, but the comedy is not really a vehicle for ideas but for two fine comic performers...

...In Lettice & Lovage, however, in a role created for her by Peter Shaffer, anything and everything goes and goes swimmingly...

...Lovage is an ingredient of a medieval drink which Lettice gives Lotte and, in the great tradition of booze as a repression remover, the drink rescues Lotte from the role that a drab society has forced upon her...

...If the play were really about the richness-of-then versus the thinness-of-now, Fustian House would not have been the historical bore it is...

...The character whom Tyzack plays a bureaucrat with the Preservation Trust may have dictated her style, but I prefer to think of her performance as half a thespic contest...

...Lotte, it turns out, is a bottled-up romantic under her sensible office clothes, and she has to be saved by Lettice and Lovage...

...New is bad, tacky, shoddy...

...The flamboyance prize went to Maggie Smith clearly, but often, while she was doing intricate and amusing things, I found my eyes wandering to Tyzack to check her responses...

...Smith, as Millamant, could only chalk up points at the expense of her character, who became silly in a way Congreve never intended...

...The variations she plays on the Fustian story are a small joke that looms large only because of Maggie Smith's comic talent...

...Shaffer appears, almost accidentally, to have built his ending on unprepared ground...

...after all, stage drunks do not have delirium tremens, they see six-foot white rabbits named Harvey...

...she held herself stiffly straight where Smith's equally upright figure could corkscrew if necessary...

...From the beginning, the play through Lettice has advocated imagination, emotion, incandescence over fact, control, shadow...

...She walked firmly where Smith floated...

...gerald wealesld weales...

...What more could one expect from the author of Equus, which celebrated the healthiness of neurotic violence...

...As Lettice, a guide at Fustian House, the most boring building administered by the Preservation Trust, she shares the stage with a group of actors who change costumes and characters to represent groups of tourists at different times...

...They end by planning to form a tour operation of their own to show people the ugliness and banality of contemporary architecture...

...Having given us Lettice/Smith in full flower, Shaffer turns to a plot of sorts...

...This kind of reading asks too much of Lettice & Lovage...

...Lettice is essentially a cartoon character, as is Lotte Schoen (Tyzack) in her different way...

...this was a real comic team at work...

...After a labored twist or two in the plot, Lotte, in her turn, must save Lettice from giving up on a world that lacks the color to make life a joy...

...He became so cold, so tight, so rigid that he commanded my eyes, my attention as Laughton oozed all around him...

...From her first, presumably historical account of what happened* or rather did not happen at Fustian House, a presentation that invokes yawns and impatience, Lettice invents, decorates, emotes (her mother toured on an all-female Shakespeare company in France) until she has an enthusiastic audience at her feet...

...As I watched and listened to Maggie Smith with wonder and joy as her body and her voice fluttered and soared and pirouetted around the stage, I kept waiting to see what Margaret Tyzack an excellent actress as those who remember her Countess in All's Well That Ends Well know would do in the face of so histrionic a storm...

...Enter Cecil Parker...

...This was not a top banana-second banana sketch...

...So too with the secondary characters played broadly and funnily by Bette Henritze and Paxton Whitehead, whose part consists largely of surprised reactions...

...STAGE MAGGIE FOR THE FUN OF IT 'LETTICE & LOVAGE' cannot swear to it but I suspect I was the only person who found himself thinking about an obscure World War II melodrama while watching Maggie Smith go through her incredible antics in the first act of Lettice & Lovage...

...The first act belongs to Maggie Smith...