BASED firmly on the Burgess-Maclean affair, this play concerns what
could happen if the abandoned wife of an absconded fellow- traveller began, a year later, to receive mes- sages from him. He implies that his attitude is unchanged and he assumes hers to be also; later, she is to visit him clandestinely in Patio
Great questions—of Iove and loyalty, of intellectual honesty, of faith in men and in ideas—arc implicit here. They are not answered; or, at least, not in a way that is believable, for the action is hung on as unreal a list of dramatic persotue as ever graced a Victorian melodrama or Ruritanian operetta. They have rolled straight off the Popular Novelist's Assembly Line right on to the script of the play. If you can imagine something as gruesome as the Dale Family transmuted out of its cosy suburb into the WI postal district, and with its income and pretensions suitably amplified, this is it.
What these characters think, how they explain it, and what action follows, has simply no relationship with the world of which the Burgess-Maclean affair was —and is—com- pounded. Marjorie Fielding, as the absentee's mother, stood mountain-high out of the ruck of ready-made attitudes and women's-magazine values; though one felt it was strictly a triumph of technique vver implausibility.
A. V. C.
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