Prematurely Gray

TOM STOPPARD's DIRTY LINEN took its time getting to Boston from its London debut four years age, and it really wasn't worth the wait. A play about loose morals in high places may have been timely back then, but today Stoppard's collection of panty humor just seems a trifle, something the author tossed off between cigarettes. The play is already showing its age, and it has not weathered the trans-Atlantic voyage that well.

Stoppard gathers a committee of imprudent MPs and gives them the task of rooting out immorality among their colleagues. As members of this special committee each inadvertently reveal pairs of panties pulled from back pockets and briefcases, you start wondering what has happened to Stoppard's proverbial cleverness. In Jumpers he used stage acrobatics to poke fun at and illuminate complicated philosophical questions; here he finds no better use for age-old sight gags than to keep his audience interested between long recitations of names of English inns.

Though Dirty Linen finds Stoppard in poor form as a thinker, it has its funny moments--when he resists the temptation to use simple bawdy humor and recovers his quirky intellectual muse. In the original London production of the show, the company had a sense of proportion, and carefully understated the strangeness of Stoppard's dialogue to make it sound more believable. Thus the show's introductory sequence--in which two MPs arrive in the committee room and converse for several minutes using only foreign cliches--succeeded through the lack of self-consciousness on the stage.

Ed Berman's British-American Repertory Company (BARC), on the other hand, acts a bit self-conscious throughout the play, and exaggerates the caricaturing native to the script. To be fair, some of the actors in the company restrain themselves, but they only look-incongruous among their mugging colleagues.

Sarah Venable as Maddie, the buxom secretary to the committee who is the root of Parliament's moral problem and who seems to know every government official by his first name, is the centerpiece of the show in more than just a visual way. Stoppard starts this character out as an unembellished dumb broad, and about halfway through the show transforms her into a voice of the common people, instructing the MPs on their duties, telling them, "The people don't care about what you do on your own time--it's only the newspapers," and eventually writing the draft of the committee report.

Stoppard's only message is hardly original or airtight; it's nothing new to tell politicans they should worry about doing their jobs right and not about their public images, and it's specious to say that only newspapers are interested in sex scandals when the newspapers that cover then sell hundreds of thousands more copies than the newspapers that don't.

In New-Found-Land, Stoppard's play-within-a-play, both the author and the performers are in better form. New-Found-Land is in some ways even more of a trifle than Dirty Linen--it's essentially two monologues, one delivered by a senile minister about his youthful meeting with Lloyd George, the other by a young civil servant about his dreams of America. John Straub as Bernard, the codger, steals the show with simple, somnolent nods of his head--a note of comic understatement other members of BARC could learn from.

Davis Hall delivers Arthur's monologue, a 25-minute anthology of cliches about America, with more spirit than technique. This sequence can be one of Stoppard's funniest; its droning tour through Hollywood images of American cities in the '30s, with recaps in every train station, ought to build from a slow start to demonic possession. Hall starts off with too much energy, and, unable to add more, resorts to flailing his arms to hold the audience's attention.

BETWEEN DIRTY LINEN and New-Found-Land, Stoppard has managed to fill out an evening of theater, even to make it entertaining. But there's so much more to expect from the author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It's a bit sad to see a man who challenged Shakespeare to verbal duels wasting his time pulling blue panties out of his characters' pockets.