Fall of the House of Carney

The death knell of the realistic play is sounded every season, and each season some play refutes it. A Whistle in the Dark is just such a drama. It has the raw, roiling energy of life. It is full of the rude poetry of the commonplace. It states truths about human nature that one would rather forget, and reminds one that being born human is the alltime crisis of every man.

One of the pressure points of that crisis is the family. The Carneys are a pride of Irish gutter lions. The father is a drunkard, a bully and a braggart. When his boys were small children, he routed them out of bed at 2 or 3 a.m. and set them to clouting each other till they collapsed. Bred to the tooth and the claw, three of the sons live as pimps, louts and barflies. A fourth son, Michael, flees this world of lacerating animal instinct. He settles in Coventry, marries an English girl and opts for a life of decency, order and reason. But the clan Carney moves in with him like blood-sucking Furies.

Paralyzed by Inadequacy. This is where the play actually begins, and the events that follow have resonances of The Homecoming—though Irish Playwright Thomas Murphy's play was produced four years before Pinter's. The brothers make passes at Michael's wife and even suggest using his home as a whorehouse. Michael is faced down, raged at and humiliated by his father, who is a perfect blend of aging bull and undiminished blarney. Michael's wife urges him to stand up for his rights. But he is paralyzed by a nagging sense of masculine inadequacy.

As the evening builds to a tragic climax, a melancholy sense of the dooming, repetitive quality of family life patterns grows with it. The playgoer is invaded and disturbed by a sense of the lost ifs that determine people's lives. If the father had not been an alcoholic, if some rays of civilized light had filtered into the Carney home, if brute passions could be confined to the brutes, if, if, if—a lament for humanity's near misses at achieving humanity. For awful as they are, the Carneys are not all bad. They have courage, they are loyal, they tell the truth, insofar as they can see it. Their destiny is not to be evil but to be unable to mobilize and release the good qualities that they have in them. It is the playwright's essential fairness and depth of understanding of this plight that give A Whistle in the Dark its strength, wisdom and broody disconcerting beauty.

The performances are all labors of skill and love. For a flawless delineation of the charm, bluster and pathos of the self-conned father, Stephen Elliott's work should be studied by any actor who ever cherished his craft. There is a silent music in Arvin Brown's direction as he moves his players through arpeggios of violence and a discriminating counterpoint of darkness and light to give a final touch of distinction to a play worthy of every tribute.