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...