Theatre
Rix's return
Kenneth Hurren Fringe Benefits (Whitehall)
Just a Little Bit Less Than Normal (Royal Court, Theatre Upstairs)
We were lucky to get any new theatre at all in London last week. Half the leading reviewers were off to Edinburgh (the half, that IS, who can still persuade themselves that there will be any drama worth looking at in a musical festival that affords but token recognition to other arts), and London managements, if they're going to be knocked, prefer tobe knocked by the best.
Brian Rix is an insouciant exception. He doesn't care who knocks him. He stayed at the Whitehall Theatre for nearly. twenty Years through the 'fifties and 'sixties with a handful of awful farces that would have given reviewers a dog's life if they hadn't all run for a dog's lifetime. Rix eventually deParted the Whitehall with a small fortune, leaving the boards to Paul Raymond and some even more awful farces that featured a great many naked people and naturally threatened to be even more successful. The appeal of strangers' genitalia, however, Proved no more immune than anything else in show business to the law of diminishing returns, and now, the invitation of Fiona Richmond and her colleagues to 'Come into MY Bed' having been fastidiously declined bY an astonishing propoetion of the population, the unconquerable Rix is back.
It is only because of the recent history of the theatre in which he is appearing that it seems necessary to reassure his admirers that, though he may (and, indeed, does) lose his trousers, he does not lose his underPants. Fringe Benefits, though mysteriously billed as a comedy, is in precisely the tra(iition of the farces that scampered across this stage, as indistinguishably as mice, during the previous Rix incumbency; and Part of that tradition is, of course, the ineffable innocence of everything and its extreme circumspection. Adultery may be Mooted, but does not actually occur. Wives 'nay be carried away by the idea of deceiving their husbands, and husbands may seem similarly keen to vary the conjugal routine !Y having affairs with their secretaries, but It is essential that all such improper plans should be thwarted. In a French farce, the accomplishment of illicit sexual congress is thoroughly acceptable, since the people are, after all, French and given to that sort bf `"Ing. In an English farce, it cannot be
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`°1-intenanced. An Englishman, in moments 01 terrible frailty, may dream of infidelity, even toy excitedly with the notion, but he is wtiOt such a cad or rotter as to go through eith it ; not in a farce, anyway, and 'pecially not if he is played by Brian Rix. This is probably all you need to know about the plot of Fringe Benefits, in which the sporty intentions of two middle-aged husbands (played by Rix and Terence Alexander) in regard to a brace of comely young women, and those of their wives (Jane Downs and Barbara Kinghorne) involving a plumber and his mate, are predictably doomed to come to nothing but happy frustration and a general endorsement of the superior joys of the marriage bed. The authors. Peter Yeldham and Donald Churchill, are not above the abysmal gags that will evoke memories of the farces with which Rix was associated in the old days (*Tomorrow I'm going on a diet of prunes and all-bran'/'How moving'), but here and there they rather step out of line and verge upon a humour that is almost identifiable as wit. They are also rather amusingly inventive in the brinkmanship peculiar to these enterprises—in which the moment of discovery when all will be lost is always just around the corner, or at least just behind a door that is opened or closed in the nick of time—and they lavish suitable attention on Rix's trousers which, when not actually around his ankles, are apt to be concealing anything from a dead fish to a ringing telephone. Even the earnest chaps who elected to go to Edinburgh instead might have found a chuckle or two in it.
There is some drollery, too, and more surprisingly, in Nigel Baldwin's Just a Little Bit Less Than Normal, which has to do with the predicament of a young man who loses a leg in a pub bombing. The circumstances in which the leg is lost struck me as a dubiously contrived attempt to invest the theme with a special contemporary urgency, and I'm ntt sure that the play can carry the irrelevance. When it is dealing with the adjustments a man with this sort of disablement has to make, though, it is both dramatic and convincing. Baldwin writes with a sharp humour, a compelling irony s and almost none of the sentimentality that his subject matter might have encouraged. He is a dramatist worth watching.
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