Hung in Public

DIRTY LINEN CLINGS to the American stage more pertinaciously than any other Tom Stoppard play--as if hanging on for life. While other, richer Stoppard plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead or Jumpers tarried a brief moment in the spotlight and then scampered into classrooms to become "contemporary plays capable of being studied," Dirty Linen keeps rearing its head bashfully on the stage.

Just last year at about this time Ed Berman's British-American Repertory Company brought Dirty Linen to the Wilbur Theater in a production that amply demonstrated the play's waning interest. Stoppard's dramatic intellect is more versatile and thoughtful than most, but in Dirty Linen he delivers a simplistic homily on the rights and wrongs of public servants and the media, accompanied by comic fireworks. In his better plays they illuminate his themes in brilliant flashes; in Dirty Linen they simply forestall restlessness in the audience.

What was there to say about sex scandals that prompted Stoppard to write a whole play about them? That they are trifling things; that they have little or nothing to do with the quality of government; that they transcend party and ideology; that they sell newspapers. But Dirty Linen does not explore the psychology of public prurience, does not try to explain why people buy newspapers when they contain prying stories about politicians' private lives. In the play's epiphanic moment, a buxom secretary named Maddie Gotobed--the "Titian-haired, green-eyed" enchantress at the root of this particular scandal--instructs the committee of M.P.s investigating the charges that "the people" care about how they perform their public jobs, not how they conduct their personal lives. A sigh and a smile sweeps through the audience; they, too, can share in the self-righteous glow of this conclusion, and only the press need feel guilty--no mention of the sad truth that "the people" themselves buy the newspapers that sensationalize sex-in-politics.

The play trips down a path paved with jokes on foreign phrases, sight gags with panties, and tongue-twisting lists of pub names. Stoppard's ear for the curious-sounding proper noun is responsible for many of Dirty Linen's laughs; but between this dependence on the odd British name and the peculiarly British obsession with both perpetrating and denouncing scandalous activity, the play poses special difficulties for American performers. The Winthrop cast meets its challenge with modest skill, and no pretense of doing anything more than presenting a funny play. The script plasters over its mediocre theme with superficially brilliant wordplay; the director and cast make the best of it by paying the theme as little attention as possible and playing the verbal trickery for all it's worth.

David Dodds as Cocklebury-Smythe and Steven Ives as McTeazle, two M.P.s who arrive early for their committee meeting, kick off Stoppard's introductory exchange of foreign phrases somewhat awkwardly; these are strange lines to recite, and would benefit from a touch less caricature, a touch more natural ease. But both, along with their fellow committee members--played by Nick D' Arienzo, Anne Troy, and Tom Blumenfeld--quickly achieve a nice pace and a smooth ensemble, broken only infrequently by mistimed punchlines or fumbled bits of business with the many panties cluttering the stage.

Anne Walsh as Maddie faces a tougher challenge in fleshing out Stoppard's lightly sketched drawing of this bashful yet forthright, dimwitted yet wise "woman of the people." This character is difficult to play because Stoppard uses it as both a center-spring for the plot and as a mouthpiece for his moralizing, and the two are at odds. Walsh succeeds only half-way: her sluttish, gum-chewing, boneheaded secretary is so convincing that when she starts to write the parliamentary committee's draft report, you feel the words are coming from Stoppard--because you know they couldn't come from her.

DIRTY LINEN CONTAINS within it, like a diamond in a block of coal, a delightfully irrelevant two-man interlude entitled New-Found-Land. In the committee-room that the sex-scandal investigators have temporarily vacated, an elderly and a youthful Home Office bureaucrat deliver monologues to each other that epitomize stereotypical visions of England and America. The break is a welcome one. Keith Rogal as Bernard-- the senescent and near-deaf senior officer whose droning, endless tale of a five-pound bet with Lloyd George is by far the evening's funniest sequence-- turns hesitation into a form of comic torture, and uses stock mannerisms of old age to excellent effect.

The bulk of New-Found-Land consists of a monologue by the younger official that transports the audience from its evening-long sojourn in Britain to a whirlwind tour of the U.S.A. As Arthur, Barry Mann must sustain a vividness of vision and intensity of delivery over the 15-minute speech, as he drags the audience from New York to Chicago to San Francisco, from one cliche of 1930s America to another--Hell's Kitchen, Chicago newsmen, dustbowls, Okies and all. With a wild eye and a remarkable range of voices, Mann holds the audience's attention and summons into the theater the images in Stoppard's oration. The transition from Bernard's somnolent maunderings to Arthur's vigorous gesticulating ought to develop more gradually, however; by jumping head-first into his monologue, Mann loses an opportunity to scale the intensity of his speech in an upward arc, making this vastness of exposition more listenable.

New-Found-Land trails awkwardly back into an epilogue to Dirty Linen, leaving everyone slightly disappointed. There are virtues in these plays, and New-Found-Land, especially, gleams with the special verbal artisanship that is Stoppard's genius. But there are so many better plays by this author that are as easily staged and as fully gratifying that Winthrop House's production seems like an act of needless mercy towards a play that deserves euthanasia.