Blessed Are the Real

All in Good Time, by Bill Naughton. People are a vanishing breed in the theater. Playwrights seem to know all about clinical freaks, but little of human beings. England's Bill Naughton is a cheering exception. All in Good Time makes a tenderly perceptive human comedy out of a single obvious and quaint-sounding joke, the inability of a pair of young English provincial newlyweds to consummate their marriage.

The bridegroom (Brian Murray) is an intellectually bemused boy with Beethoven in his inner ear and a blue-collar father around his neck. Father (Donald Wolfit) is a deliciously unimpaired specimen of Cro-Magnon man who recalls that his father "always said that if a thing was natural, you'd see animals doing it. I've yet to see a horse reading a book."

An iron curtain separates father from son, but only a matchstick partition divides their bedrooms, and that proves woefully inhibiting. Without any psychoanalytical jargonmongering, Naughton shows how every wedding bed contains six people. The tragicomic past of the two sets of parents is part of the couple's current plight.

In a comic wonder of a cast, Marjorie Rhodes, as the bridegroom's mother, is the standout, batting out a caustic aside with a batted eyelash. If Father Wolfit is the cakes and ale of the play, Mother Rhodes is its gin and bitters. But the entire evening belongs to blessedly real people who are not crammed with half-baked oddities but full of bread-fed humanity.