There's a Girl in My Soup

Perfide Albion is at it again. After an enticing warmup act, of a dozen or so excellent shows, it has sent over a nasty little comedy called There's a Girl in My Soup in the hope that Yanks will buy anything English.

Apart from Saturday night's performance, which drove me out of the Colonial Theatre after the first act, there are three outstandingly appalling things about There's a Girl in My Soup.

First, it is a part of a genre, not just a freak. Broadway sees at least two sex comedies every season. Sex comedies have nothing to do with real people, real love, or real sex, and it was a sex comedy, I think, that Walter Kerr called "the kind of play that gives flops a bad name."

The archtypical sex comedy title, which states the genre's basic premise, is Love is a Four Letter Word. The archtypical sex comedy lead is a hardened playboy, who turns out, in the third act, really to be no more of a stud than Ferdinand the Bull.

Sex comedies are seldom even "well made;" they tend to consist of a series of one-liners drawn from the shallow folkloric pool of stag humor. The jokes get dirtier as the show goes along, creating a facsimile of dramatic climax.

The second appalling thing about the play was the audience which laughed at it. When the crowd roars as one at a line like, "Your sex life is like a continual winetasting: you roll 'em around and spit 'em out"--then you begin to wonder about the audience and forget your morbid curiosity about the author.

Finally, there is the realization that this show has run for nearly two years in London, the greatest of English-speaking theatre cities, the city which has provided Broadway with most of its finest hours these past three years.

But to see Soup is to look at the dark side of the British theatrical moon which is teeming with mal-produced musicals and jerry-built comedies. This play brings home the theatrically if not geographically accurate fact that much of the West End is Rotten Row.