On Broadway: Hippie Daddy

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Peter Ustinov often gives the impression that he can write a play with one hand tied behind his back. Unfortunately, half of Halfway Up the Tree seems to have been written with the tethered hand. Never so bad as to make its intermissions seem like blessed reprieves, Tree is never so good as to make its acts seem like comic rewards.

Ustinov has chosen to view hippiedom as the social dawn of a New Jerusalem. A very pukka Sahib general (played with quaint and artful foxiness by Anthony Quayle) comes home from liquidating the white man's bumbling in Malaysia, only to find that his son and daughter have become neoprimitive natives of swinging England. His daughter (Margaret Linn) is complacently pregnant—by whom, she cannot be sure. His bearded guitar-laden son (Sam Waterston) looks "like a leftover from the Last Supper," and his so-called mistress is a breastless, hipless, bass-voiced androgyne. Ultimately, the general goes his filial foes one better at anarchic nonconformity by growing a beard himself, living in a tree and mastering the guitar. The quality of the humor is as strained as the plot. Ustinov seems to have aped Bernard Shaw without the wit, Neil Simon without the wisecrack.