The Hole

The British playwright N. F. Simpson is not a raving lunatic, although that is the first impression his two plays give. On the contrary, Mr. Simpson is lucidly, frighteningly, overwhelmingly sane. His unblinking perception of the rationalized madness that we call human life misleads one at first into thinking his plays gibberish, but we soon perceive that they are not the products of a chimpanzee pecking away at a typewriter, beloved example of statisticians as the primate may be. A Resounding Tinkle and The Hole are the result of something as rare as chimps actually--rather than in imagination--at typewriters: they come from articulately humorous and serious intelligence.

It is Simpson who has advanced the proposition (in his One-Way Pendulum, not yet produced in this country) that if one weighing machine can speak your weight, five hundred weighing machines can sing the Hallelujah Chorus. Weighing machines that speak your weight are a phase of the twentieth-century American revolution that has not yet reached America, but the perfection of Simpson's repsonse to them, the carrying of lunacy to its amusingly disquieting end, elicited admiration and aroused high expectations for the two plays to be presented by Club 47 as its first production of the summer season.

The Hole, in its American premiere fully satisfies all the hopes that theatre news from Britain has excited in followers of avant-grade drama. It is one of those plays about which people disagree, disagree even as to what it is about. I would suggest that perhaps Simpson intends to supplement the venerable Bede, Trevelyan, Thornton Wilder, and The Times, as historian of Church, England, mankind, and the times. Early in the play (and in a manner reminiscent of some of Our Town's devices) he calls our attention to the large meaning he wants his play to have (and the correspondingly high standards by which it must be judged) and also to its relevance to today: "This is a small queue which has been forming for weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, aeons, days and indeed for some hours now..."

The hole, like The Hole, is many things. The characters see in it trinitarian aquaria, golf-players, junction boxes; and one, The Visionary, sees people waiting for "the solemn unveiling of the great window in the south transept whose quote or rather misquote many-coloured glass will God willing in all probability stain the white radiance of eternity unquote to the everlasting glory of God." (I haven't the foggiest idea whether or not the play is a Christian play, but I am certain that upholders of both points of view will be found after every performance.) The hole is the mind of man, the history of humbuggery, and, most particularly, ideas of God.

Clearly, this is very much a do-it-yourself play, in which form and meaning are not obvious in the script. Such a play requires exceedingly skillful direction and acting if it is to appear coherent enough and meaningful enough for the spectator to want to puzzle about it and pour his own interpretation into the container Simpson has provided. (And it is a moderately flexible receptacle, although there are limits to how far the elastic will stretch.) On the basis of last night's dress rehearsal, the production appears fully to meet the demands of the script. Stephen Aaron has directed it splendidly, creating suspense where appropriate, excitement when needed, interest at all times. He manages with five people convincingly to mobilize the armies of the British Empire for an assault on the Wogs in a last stand for God, Country, and Eton.

George Bolton and Ed O'Callahan as Cerebro and Soma make believably solid citizens, and they can say absurd things without blinking an eyelash, which is what the play requires. Fred Morehouse and Endo seemed overly conscious of himself as an actor last night, where the apparent consciousness of the others was of their stage personages, rather than their off-stage personalities. Randy Echols' Visionary has little to do (which is very difficult for an actor to do well) and Echols is fine at it. He has a touching moment of pathos and beauty at the end of the play as he sets his alarm clock, pulls a blanket around his aging shoulders and settles down by the hole to wait for the unveiling.

The Hole has a hole for a set, and it is a metaphysical absurdity to discuss the competence with which a hole is rendered. (Its surroundings will do.) The play is preceded at the Club 47 by A Resounding Tinkle (also an American premiere), a slighter and less interesting drama in which Beryl Kinrose-Wright provides a particularly fine performance.