The Theater: New Plays on Broadway, Oct. 17, 1960

Becket (translated from the French of Jean Anouilh by Lucienne Hill) seems to fascinate writers as a stage figure: Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, now Anouilh. He also rather tends to defeat them: Anouilh’s long play has the weaknesses without the high compensatory moments of Murder in the Cathedral. In its 22 scenes, Becket offers all manner of effective pageantry and colloquy and confrontation, even of wenching and horseplay; it runs up and down a whole verbal keyboard, playful trills and prayerful chords and swelling harmonies.

But in this story of Henry II and his great friend Thomas Becket, whom he made Chancellor and then Primate of England, and who abandoned him for God, the biggest things seem missing. It is not merely that there is little cumulative drama, so that the evening is edged with dullness. There is little poetry either, and not really much psychology, and no guarantee of history. Though Henry and Becket are set squarely beside and then against each other, there is no vital force to the conjunction, or fire to the conflict. Finally, there is no unifying tone; in language and attitude, Becket skips blithely across centuries, shuttles nonchalantly between styles.

That Anouilh made free with history—anticipated the use of forks in England, changed earldoms to dukedoms, implicated Henry far more in Becket’s murder than he really was, gave Becket, what no one else has done for generations, a Saxon lineage—would matter little had all this given Anouilh’s imagination greater force and scope. But he has played up trivialities while scamping essentials: Becket’s great career as Chancellor is passed over; his clashes with Henry, on becoming Archbishop of Canterbury, go unused. Anouilh, again, oversimplifies character—amusingly enough when treating of minor figures, but unwisely in making hardly more than a lout of Henry.

Nor is Becket himself—whom Henry made archbishop as his shield against the church, only to emerge Becket’s target—rewardingly probed. This is a troublesome task, for Becket’s abrupt shift from worldling to ascetic, from Henry’s helpful administrator to his hostile priest, needs probing; indeed, the whole unsimple man who suddenly found God needs probing. But the Becket whom a historian has dubbed “a great actor superbly living the parts he was called upon to play” seems far less than that, even with a great actor, Laurence Olivier, on hand to play him. Olivier is as deft as Anthony Quinn’s Henry is vigorous, but they serve only Anouilh, they do not light up the past.

The trouble is, perhaps, that Becket did not fascinate Anouilh; he merely tempted and challenged him. With that great facility that is his most self-damaging gift, Anouilh has contrived blunt or ironic or booming effects, pulled off scenes involving bedrooms and bishops and cynical Kings of France, and some fine reflective moments too, as when Becket resists the snare of a false humility. But with equal ease Anouilh goes in for every approach, from the slangiest to the most sculptured. He has thus set Peter Glenville problems of staging that have been only partly solved: with the most inward of themes, Becket runs largely to externalized effects.

A Taste of Honey (by Shelagh Delaney) was written, out of dissatisfaction with seeing flaccid plays, by a 19-year-old Lancashire girl. By the time she was 21 it had run for a year in London’s West End, as it deserved to. For a playwright of 19, A Taste of Honey is a most talented piece of work.

Actually a deeper dissatisfaction than trivial plays had inspired it: a dissatisfaction with the shabby world that Shelagh Delaney knew at first hand, and a sense of blockaded lives. It is a dissatisfaction that very often leaps to life through words that have edge and ring true, among people who are disturbed but vital, in scenes where lives come together, or clash, or come apart. An illegitimate young girl lives with her tramp of a mother, who soon enough runs off with a man. The girl herself has a brief affair with a Negro sailor on leave, becomes pregnant, is cared for by a young homosexual who moves in with her, and at the end is left alone to have her baby.

What is most rewarding and least nine-teenish about A Taste of Honey is its un-histrionic realism, which blinks at nothing but can be wry as well as harsh, can use sunlight to make soot the more visible, and can blend a knack for theater with a sense of truth. With its misfits and misfortunes, all too much of the play could have turned sentimental; only here and there is it a little so. Even more, it could have turned sensational, but bold black words like Illegitimacy and Homosexuality and Miscegenation boil down into what is in the world and what happens in life, and indeed the girl’s touching, not unthorny relationship with the homosexual is the best thing in the play. Nor does A Taste of Honey shout its protest, which is as much social as economic, and aimed less at the system than the Establishment.

Where Honey falls short is where its method falls short—in a lack of intensifi cation and fusion. The play is episodic, without all the episodes being equally good; it is for the most part closeups, without all the characters being equally real (the mother is not always seen in focus and is played by Angela Lansbury too much for farce). But if there is a want of art to A Taste of Honey, there is equally a want of contrivance, and Joan Plowright’s brilliant portrayal of the girl raises the play at its best from gifted 19 to full maturity.