The Theater: False Premises

HABEAS CORPUS

by ALAN BENNETT

Can even a farce rest only on a pair of falsies? It is true that in the course of Habeas Corpus (which means, appropriately, let's have the body) a couple of sets of real female breasts are fondled and pummeled, and one or two actors lose their trousers, but the evening's focus is on a pair of "the Rubens, made of sensitized Fablon as used on Apollo space missions." The breastworks are delivered to one Connie Wicksteed, who looks so like a choirboy that the errant local curate has fallen in love with her. Connie lives in the genteel resort town of Hove with her brother Arthur, a G.P. specializing in lechery, his wife Muriel, a lady endowed with Jane Russell proportions, and a cleaning woman who is a victim of overexposure to modern communication: "I'm now going into the lotus position." By the time a salesman arrives to make sure the falsies fit, Connie has gone Girl Scouting, but several other stock characters—including Muriel's former lover, the minuscule Sir Percy Shorter, and a mindless sexpot, Felicity Rumpers—have joined the seedy Wicksteed household for the game of "Who's got them on?"

What follows is entirely predictable and unabashedly vulgar. Inhibitions must be left at the door. Alan Bennett, one of the quartet of Beyond the Fringe a decade ago, has constructed no more than a sloppy farce, but in Director Frank Dunlop's nimble hands it becomes an uproarious kaleidoscope of pratfalls. The Wicksteeds live in a world still superficially Victorian, but underneath there rage fires of frustration fed by the characters' anxiety that if an opportunity arises, their sexual equipment may be unequal to the occasion. Thus every double-entendre is not merely dirty but wistful. The cast acts as if high on speed. Two are supreme. Donald Sinden turns Arthur into an irresistible hypocrite whose mind is so firmly fixed on sex that everything else is tiresome distraction, while Rachel Roberts' surrender of Muriel's well-bred façade to exigent desire fills the stage with the cheery sensuality of oldtime British music hall.

Gina Mallet