"Marriage," observed Dr. Johnson, "has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures," and Western theater has spent much of the past 150 years in trying to decide whether there are any other better alternatives to marriage. In London's forty-one main theaters there are about a dozen marital comedies and dramas currently running, the stage equivalent of television sitcoms, a proportion which has varied little over the decades. There have always been plays like Run for your Wife or No Sex, Please - We're British, now in its umpteenth year and still attracting coachloads to the august portals of the Garrick Theater.
Well, love, of course, is an inexhaustible topic, as are sex and scandal; and there may seem to be nothing strange about so evident a preoccupation. But marital plays are rarely about love exactly, but rather about the "dos" and "don'ts" of social conventions, which shift subtly from year to year, transforming the improper into the proper or even fashionable. In 1965, Alan Ayckbourn's Relatively Speaking was thought to be a daring play, not one to which a maiden aunt should be invited; but at its recent revival at Greenwich Theater the auditorium was packed with aunts, uncles, and senior citizens, happily enjoying the slightly risqué humor, while the young couples were leaving at the interval.
The swinging sixties and the dangling seventies being over, a new mood of Puritanism has begun to affect London. The sex shops in Soho are closing down, due partly to government action and partly to a decline in trade; and it is now no longer fashionable to have several sleeping partners. There is very little nudity on the West End stages; and two of the most successful recent revivals have come from the straitlaced thirties, of the musical Me and My Gal and of J.B. Priestely's comedy When We Are Married.
The fact that When We Are Married has become a hit is particularly surprising, for the play is very slight indeed, although it does offer opportunities for the kind of character performances in which British actors excel. Three stuffy and self-important couples from the Yorkshire town of Clecklewyke discover to their horror on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversaries that, strictly speaking, they're not legally married at all, the erstwhile parson not having been properly qualified at the time they were married. The local press is inquisitive, the servants get uppity, and the dignity of the stout parties is saved at the last moment only by an unexpected twist in the plot which reputable critics many not divulge.
It's a nostalgic curiosity, deliberately old-fashioned when it was written in 1938, for it harks back to the golden days at the turn of the century. But it does offer a comforting image of Britain from the time when the North was rich, not poor, when there were lavish high teas with salmon and fruitcake. And the director, Richard Eyre, has assembled a marvelous company of stalwart actors, none of them top-notch stars, to do justice to every nuance of class in Priestley's lines, which emerge fresh and sparkling like Neil Simon gags.
Bill Fraser has the juiciest part as the bemused and pickled photographer, trying to focus his lenses through the mists of alcohol. To watch him opening a door with one leg in the way or maneuvering his tripod around settees and cabinets full of delicate china objects is like being transported back to the Edwardian music halls. But this is a solo turn, not part of the play's
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