Theater: Must There Always Be A Red Brick England?

Billy Liar. Perhaps this drama should have a composite title such as The Sporting Life of the Long-Distance Runner who All in Good Time found a Taste of Honey in an L-Shaped Room at the Top on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. More than familiar to U.S. film and playgoers nowadays is middleclass, industrial England: the rows on rows of red brick prison houses, the suffocating parochialism, the intellectual sterility, the emotional desiccation, the measuring out of life in tepid teacups, the apotheosis of fornication as the only salvation. The milieu has become predictable and precariously close to a bore. One knows not only what one will meet in such a house but who the residents will be. The father will be a petty tyrant who punctuates every sentence with the word bloody. The mother will be a crushed drab who never lets anyone forget the burdens she bears, flaying the family along with the food.

The son will be bright, rebellious, impudent and frustrated. The girl will be prematurely pregnant.

This off-Broadway production contains a royal crock of a grandmother, acted with curmudgeonly perfection by Ethel Griffies. Miss Griffies will be 87 next month. She seems considerably younger than the play.