Theater: A Bird Is a Bird Is a Bird

Alfie! by Bill Naughton. A bird is a girl in cockney argot, and Alfie is strictly out for the birds. In this unpretentious and consistently pleasant comedy, Alfie counts the workaday world well lost for lust. He is the modern, international antihero, the man who wants to be kind to everyone and responsible to no one.

As a cockney Casanova, Alfie leaves behind him a trail of broken hearts and gravid wombs. If worse comes to worst, Alfie is game to arrange an abortion, though not quite up to paying for it. In the lost lingo of yesteryear, Alfie is a bit of a cad, and it might follow from this that he is repellent. Quite the contrary. Terence Stamp plays him with enormously ingratiating charm, zest and skill. More important, Playwright Naughton has netted a real character, and reality exonerates itself in the theater, turning moralizing attitudes into carping ghosts at a feast.

Alfie woos and walks out on six birds. One bird is a nesting sort and makes Alfie a father. His idea of child support is to buy a teddy bear. Another is a Venus flytrap. Still another likes to slave for Alfie, and it touches him, but workers are neuters. “Look at it —scrub, scrub, scrub.”

Like most moderns, Alfie suffers from overspecialization, and the comedy could use some of the variety and conflict that spice drama. Still, Alfie himself is irresistibly in the tradition of the picaresque novel, and his running asides are canny and constant delights: “If you make a married woman laugh, you’re halfway there with her. Mind you, it don’t work with a single bird. Get one of them laughin’ and you don’t get nothin’ else.” Bill Naughton was a truck driver before he began writing plays, but it is obvious that he kept a sharp eye on a lot of things besides the road.