King's Head
'Blind Date'
John Barber, Daily Telegraph, March 15, 1977
THE two people who meet, yet never meet, in Frank Marcus's lunchtime play at the King's Head, Islington, "Blind Date," first spoke together on the telephone. His Secretary had shown him her picture, and he fancied her at once.
This funny-sad comedy is a drily sardonic study of those tentative and desperate smoke-signals we send up in the hope of finding a kindred spirit. It is also, as often with this author, a confrontation of lustful dream-images with the bread-and-butter reality of everywhere around us.
After his telephone gallantries she was expecting a John Wayne at their railway-station rendezvous, and she ignores the agitated and myopic ferret who plunks himself beside her. While he, stolidly married but feeling left behind by a new generation of laughing dolly-birds, does not discern one in the apprehensive creature on the bench.
By the time they realise their mistake it is too late. Having failed to recognise one another, Lothario and Jezebel drift apart, she in some desperation. Julia Foster suggests with great subtlety a girl not waving but drowning, and Nigel Hawthorne's flirtatious jitters are a delight to watch. Next week the play is being performed in the evenng.
King's Head
Blind Date
B. A. Young, Financial Times, March 11, 1977
This is a 40-minute two-hander which Frank Marcus calls "an anecdote," occupying the same sort of place in his canon as the "Cosmopolitan" stories in Maugham's.
The story is simple. Angie goes to Charing Cross Station to meet Brian, a date she's been furnished with by a friend. Each of them has seen a photo of the other, and they have spoken on the telephone. But when Brian arrives, he has lost a contact-lens and is very late and very flustered. Consequently neither recognises the other (though why neither recognises the other's voice I don't know).
After long delay they do contrive to speak to one another; they even realise who they are; but the relationship by then is irredeemably fouled up. Brian goes home to his wile, and Angie, who has been longing for some modest adventure as a change from her unadventurous fiance, undoes an extra button on her shirt. and awaits someone more exciting.
Mr. Marcus writes better for women that anyone of his generation, and the anecdote comes to a moving conclusion. Julia Foster treats Angie's emotions with skilful reserve; we know what she is feeling, but it never shows on the surface; Brian, as Nigel Hawthorne plays him, is a more straightforward character, a mature businessman out for an easy lay without sacrificing his respectability. You.,don't often get two such performances at a lunch-time theatre. Blind Date won't be a lunch-time production after the end of next week. It will move into the King's Head evening slot, at more or less the same prices, for the final week of its run.
KING'S HEAD
Blind Date
Michael Billington, Guardian, March 9, 1977
FRANK MARCUS describes Blind Date, his lunchtime play at the King's Head, as an anecdote. And that is precisely what it is: a wry, dry fable about a couple who, having made an assignation by telephone, spend a Saturday lunch time at Charing Cross Station warily eyeing each other and signally failing to make contact. More 0. Henry than Henry James, it doesn't have any strong reverberations but, like a lot of Mr Marcus's work, it shows a strong sympathy for the tenacious quirkiness of human behaviour.
Angie, the girl is a typcial Marcus heroine; a mature waif who classifies human beings as animals, thinks John Wayne was in High Noon and can't believe they have railway stations in India. Equally Brian, the man she has come to meet, is no off the peg Lothario but a married guy with two kids who has just lost a contact Iense and who can't even eat a chocolate bar without spreading a hanky over his lap.
"There's this office stud expecting to meet the whore of Babylon," says Angie at the start of the play. But Mr Marcus's whole point is that -there is a cavernous gulf between our sexual fantasies and knobbly awkward reality. But when it comes to the crunch, butter-fingered shyness and prickly defensiveness are far more common than the blithe self-confidence of the figures in pulp fiction or erotic mags.
Stronger on monologue than dialogue, the play is shrewdly observant without raising the theatrical temperature. But it gets a particularly good performance from Nigel Hawthorne who, with his clenched hair, nervous niceness and barely suppressed mania has something of the quality of an English Jack Lemmon. I think it's high time he was recognised as a real comic star.
Meanwhile Julia Foster gives the girl an acid drop quality without much enlarging on what she has done in previous Marcus works. But it's a digestible, short storyish kind of play that's on the side of the bashful and tentative without sentimentalising them.
Blind Date
Rosemary Say, Evening Standard, March 13, 1977
Resisting any temptation to hand over the review of Frank Marcus's new little "anecdote" play, Blind Date (King's Head), on the dramatic grounds of incestuous dramatic dealings, I was proved totally justified by another of his sensitive examples of what lunchtime theatre could and should be offering more frequently. This wry, very funny look at a couple who arrange by telephone to meet for the first time on a station bench is given an exact understanding of Mr. Marcus's unsentimental view of human behaviour by Julia Foster and Nigel Hawthorne, for whom the piece was written.
These two excellent actors settle down uneasily beside each other to soliloquise on the supposed delayed arrival of the unknown partner. Angie, regretting her decision as the minutes pass, her hunger unassuaged by a milk flake which she offers to share with the agitated stranger, falls back on her pastime of relating people to animals, thinking resignedly of her dull boyfriend and starting up at each loudspeaker announcement. Brian, handicapped by a lost contact lens, cannot see her clearly enough to find any resemblance to a cloudy photograph, nor can he make out the station clock or read his newspaper without using glasses that might jeopardise his uncharacteristic break from a settled married life.
Mr. Marcus sees to it that we know enough about them to justify the hopeless final realisation that they are in fact waiting for each other, their confidence eroded by a back-kick of chance they are too much on the defensive to overcome, Nigel Hawthorne's myopic movements, veering between vanity and panic, point a comedy performance that that should not be missed, while Julia Foster adds another scalp to her belt of apprehensive Marcus victims.
Blind Date
Sunday Times, March 13, 1977
At the King's Head, Blind Date is an anecdote (his word) by Frank Marcus. An assignation at Charing Cross for lunch and lust (in that order)goes wrong because the couple fail to recognise one another: but Mr Marcus makes us understand that of course it goes wrong for deeper reasons than that. From the interior monologues of the couple, we see the man as clumsy, uncertain (in several senses of the word), trying to convince himself that he is a roistering balde, when he is hardly even a blunt instrument. The girl is much more self-confident in manner, but suffers, though more subtly, from the same timor amoris; when recognition dawns on both of them, she becomes as reluctant as he to pursue the original aim, and they part curtly, her final gesture a signpoint to her inner despair. The play is full of echoes; the echoes are of lost opportunities and vain regrets, and the opportunities are those lost because the loser wills them to be, the regrets thus being doubly vain. There are implausibilities (who ever heard of an intelligible station-announcer?) but the emotional effect is convincing. So are the players, Julia Foster, all resentful insecurity protecting itself behind sexual aggression, manages to be wry, contemptuous and hurt at once, a considerable achievement, and Nigel Hawthorne (though I could not get out of my head his current performance as the galloping Major in Peter Nichols's "Privates on Parade" - well, it's his fault for being so good at it) weighs out no less meticulously the character's balance of absurdity and anxiety. But is it not time that Mr Marcus gave us another full-sized play?
