Theater: Games Lesbians Play

The Killing of Sister Georqe, by Frank Marcus, is an abrasive English comedy of cruelty on one of comedy’s classic themes—fraud. It measures the ironic gap between public appearance and private reality.

The heroine (Beryl Reid) has for years played the part of a kindly rural nurse. Sister George, in a sentimentally bucolic radio serial about a small English country town. In the serial, Sister George performs good deeds and put-puts around on her motor bike singing hymns with homey off-pitch piety. Off the air, in her London flat, Sister George is a horsy, cigar-chewing, gin-swilling, bull-roaring lesbian who coarsely flays her pliant companion, “Childie.”

Childie (Eileen Atkins) is a long, pale taffy pull of a girl with the cringing whine of an eternal sycophant and the wily compliance of a slave. At the arbitrary whim of Sister George, Childie must kneel and kiss the hem of her master’s skirt, drink her dirty bath water or chew and swallow one of her soggy cigar butts. Childie’s fraud is that while she plays the lesbian, she lusts after men and cheats on Sister George.

Sister George is in a vicious swivet because her role is to be edited out of the show. Mrs. Mercy Croft (Lally Bowers), a BBC program manager, comes bearing the unmerciful news: a ten-ton truck will collide with Sister George’s motor bike, and the entire country town will go into mourning at the loss of their beloved nurse.

Mrs. Croft is a kind of moral guardian of the radio show, seeing that nothing in the script offends the proprieties, ethics and decencies of the English home. She looks like a displaced manikin and speaks in tones of liquefied arsenic. Her fraud is that she, too, is a lesbian and has no scruples about luring Childie into ditching Sister George and becoming her private secretary. All she leaves Sister George is an offer to play the part of Clarabelle the Cow in a retch-inspiring kiddie show. At play’s end, Sister George sits alone mooing through drunken tears.

It is hard to feel really sorry for her, but Beryl Reid brings her to such vividly bitchy life that it is also hard to take the eye or mind off her. Equally expert and subtle are the acting strokes with which Eileen Atkins and Lally Bowers brush in the characters of the other two witches. Frank Marcus’ spoofing of the BBC is the weakest aspect of his play, but his stingingly unsentimental probe of what is foolish, vile, vain, concupiscent, and servile in the human animal stirs up a cauldron of laughter.