Sin, Psychosis and Satire

...They are too intellectual...

...Augustine as a man who had to fight his way into the Church with no help from grace, and fills seven quietly funny pages with a tongue-in-cheek description of the history of psychology as the transference of mechanical terminology from the external to the internal world...

...It deals with the invention of a religion...

...For a second thing, the first act of Cards, in which the members of the Identity Club destroy the personalities of some casual and invited guests, is fast and hilarious slapstick in which the characters change names, relationships, professions and clothes with the demonic speed that Groucho Marx used to change hats and centuries in the battle scene in Duck Soup...

...Cards of Identity, despite the popularity of Dennis' novel on which it is based, has not been performed here at all...

...All that the two men share, aside from the company that first produced their plays, is a random distaste for such cultural phenomena as U class distinctions and Eliot-brand religious intellectuals...

...American audiences have had to wait for the publication of Two Plays with a Preface to see just what Dennis is up to because he has not proved to be as successful an export as Osborne...

...perhaps it is too obviously a neatly contrived lecture...

...Where Osborne obviously seemed like something new to English play-goers ( hence the publicity), Dennis must have reminded them of many very disparate playwrights: the latter-day Shaw, James Bridie, Auden and Isherwood, even Peter Ustinov...

...Much of the first act consists of a conference with the engineer, who wants Moo to uphold a rational code of conduct, his wife, who is going to write the Bible and invent the mythology, and his secretary, who will provide the sacred music...

...Father Golden Orfe (who sounds like a compound of Whittaker Chambers, Lillian Roth and one of Graham Greene's whisky priests) cries out at the end of his public confession in Cards of Identity: "Here hangs a self-made parasite...

...By contrast, Cards of Identity, which is a sprawling, chaotic, busy play, trying to do too many things, trying, I suppose, to do a novel's work on the stage, is more appealing...

...For one thing, the central idea behind the Identity Club—that a man is the sum of his past and that he can be made into a different person by the manipulation of the facts of his personal history—has a relevance not only to the religious and psychological Augustinianism that plagues Dennis, but also, as he makes clear, to the international politics of our time...

...The play, which is subtitled "A History of Religion in Three Acts," is amusing in conception and much of the dialogue is funny...

...The Making of Moo, the second of the two, is the neatest, the one that s'icks most clearly to a controlling satiric idea...

...the characters—although all the surface mannerisms are sharply observed—are regularly sacrificed to the ideas, which means that they are not sympathetic nor meant to be...

...Still, they are serious and they are funny, and even though neither of them is likely ever to work its way into a long run on Broadway, there is no reason why anyone interested in the idea-tional world through which he has to go should not read them and be glad...

...Self-conscious to the last...

...They consider the various and contradictory attributes of Moo in terms which clearly indicate that the many faces of the Christian God (or any god) are being examined...

...Osborne's animadversions come as haphazard, high-flying way stations in the flight of Jimmy Porter's rhetoric, but his concern is really with his pitiful and self-pitying heroes...

...Modern religion, with an emphasis on Original Sin, and modern psychology, with an emphasis on masked motivation, Dennis would say, cut man off from the external world, send him back to his own vomit, ride him with guilt and leave him with a degraded image of the possibilities of being a man...

...I think, since he assumes that it cannot deal with social behavior) and, more importantly, takes an ideational stance which makes quite clear that the occasionally diffuse attacks of his plays are all part of an informing idea...

...In the third act, the worship of Moo has become respectable and suburban, the blood subdued to metaphor in the mouths of choir boys...

...The second act finds the worship of Moo, with its English inventors as its chief believers and prophets, arrested at the moment of human sacrifice, indicating "that any return to 'real' religion involves a going backwards into primitive barbarism...

...Bitterling's case history — have the force of good comic turns, even though, by this time, the plot and the satire appear to be on opposite sides in a tug-of-war for attention...

...His chief targets are religion and psychology, which he sees as allies in a so-far-successful attempt to impose Augus-tinian ideas of the corrupt man on the behavior of men today...

...Dennis's plays make use of the same amalgam (not necessarily in the same parts) of slapstick and intellectuality that these other dramatists have used...

...3.95...

...he is the Royal Court's satirist...

...Several of the later scenes—the speech of the nonegenarian Miss Planorbis, Dr...

...Still, although it is an obvious reaction to what is generally known as the religious revival, it fails to give a sense of immediacy...

...With Dennis, the distastes are the thing...

...In the preface that accompanies his two plays, Dennis defines satire (wrongly...

...the satire is aimed not at those foibles at which any man is willing to laugh, but at the religious, scientific and political beliefs that are most in evidence in the current marketplace of ideas...

...In the course of his preface, Dennis manages to give an unorthodox, but not unattractive, view of St...

...The Making of Moo did open off-Broadway, but it closed so quickly that only the most agile play-goers saw it...

...An English engineer, whose dam has destroyed a tribal river god by drowning him in his own water, sets out to construct a replacement...

...It is safe to assume that Nigel Dennis' plays are not likely to become popular...

...So, too, do the plays...

...Dennis' preface mixes intelligence and perversity, genuine wit and out-and-out excess...

...ALTHOUGH NIGEL DENNIS is one of the litter (out of the Royal Court Theatre by the English Stage Company) which includes John Osborne, his markings are quite different from those of the younger playwright...