Theater: LONDON STAGE: FOSSILS AND FERMENT

THE London stage mirrors the transatlantic crisis in theater. Appraising current English offerings, TIME'S drama critic T. E. Kalem finds that established playwrights are mute or faltering, while younger talents fail to fulfill their promise. There is a constant tremor of faddish experiments, but no significant explosion of creative energy. The measure of how much is expected of the stage is that everyone complains.

John Osborne, who initiated the modern English theatrical renaissance with Look Back in Anger, threatens to end it. His two new plays, Time Present and The Hotel in Amsterdam, are sad, sour, personal—and curiously oblique and lethargic. Osborne has never been much of a plot shaper, relying instead on arias of invective and hysteria. He is as much at the mercy of his voice as an operatic diva. This time his voice is overheard rather than heard. Instead of hurling anathemas, he bitches cattily. Instead of scalding, he scolds.

Joyless Round. Osborne began his career in fury at a social structure that seemed to bar men like him from wealth, privilege and social status. He now sounds like a Tory arriviste for whom all the champagne has proved to be flat. Both plays focus on the narcissistic aristocrats of theater and film.

These are people who have achieved everything except their hearts' desires. They are caught in the joyless round of choosing the top hotel to stay at, the finest restaurant to dine in, the most delectable partner to sleep with. Boredom infects their days and nights, and drink is their anodyne.

They occupy limbo, so nothing really happens. Time Present is monopolized by Pamela (Jill Bennett), an unemployed actress who swigs champagne and keeps a deathwatch on the only man she seems ever to have adored, her actor father. Pamela carps about everything from Americans to taxes to pop art, saving her choicest vitriol for a rival actress she calls "Lady Tinker-Bell" and whom she dismisses as "that blowtorch Mary Pickford." (Played by Kika Markham, she looks more like a striking diminutive version of Vanessa Redgrave.) The role of Pamela is demanding and singularly graceless, but Jill Bennett (the offstage Mrs. Osborne) is singularly graceful, grave, bruised, disenchanted.

The Hotel in Amsterdam is more of the same, leavened with more humor. This time the Osborne spokesman is a caustic writer named Laurie (Paul Sco-field). Laurie, his wife, and two other married couples form the immediate entourage of a "dinosaur" of a film producer called K.L. They have fled their employer for a secret respite in Amsterdam, but they spend most of the evening talking about him and one another. Apart from the intramural shoptalk, the chitchat goes something like this. Dan: "Have you ever thought of airlines for homosexuals?" Laurie: "I say: what a splendid idea. You could call it El Fag Airlines."