4 October 1962
TALKING TO YOU
A play by William Saroyan
Andreas Markos The Crow
Terence de Marney The Tiger
Johnny Sekka Blackstone Boulevard
Graham Payne Paul
Nigel Hawthorne Fancy Dan
ACROSS THE BOARD TOMORROW MORNING
Harry Towb Tomas Piper
Terence de Marney John Callaghan
Alexis Kanner Harry Mallory
Rex Garner Fritz
Derek Fuke Callaghan Mallory
"William Saroyan's Talking to You (Duke of York's) will bore some, annoy others, and delight the deserving, the adventurous, and the humble. It is directed by Arthur Storch with amazing finesse and played by - yes, by masters."
Sunday Times, October 7th, 1962.
Rewriting the Book of Job
Ambitious task by Mr. Saroyan
The Times, October 5th, 1962.
Mr. William Saroyan is a writer of limitless ambition, and the double bill of his one-act plays at the Duke of York's Theatre is to all intents and purposes a rewriting of the Book of Job followed by a new Apocalypse. Mr. Saroyan's Job, however, has no Voice from the Whirlwind, and his Apocalypse no new heaven but only the same old earth unaltered by a momentary transfiguration.
Talking to You, the first of the plays, which aptly gives its name to the evening's entertainment, finds a blind, vigorous man (Mr. Terence de Marney) ruling over a little paradise in a cellar largely furnished by crates. Its inhabitants are a Mexican guitarist, a coloured boxer (to whom Mr. Johnny Sekka gives a touching, radiant innocence) and, a deaf boy whom Mr. Sekka protects. Graham Payne's performance as the boy, totally unaware of what is not seen and breaking into difficult, toneless speech, is remarkable. Evil, in the person of Mr. Nigel Hawthorne, breaks in while the blind ruler is absent, and Mr. Sekka is killed by a ridiculous embodiment of law while the wrongdoer escapes. "What's the matter with everybody? What's the matter everywhere?" cries the little boy, but Mr. Saroyan does not tell him.
Across the Board Tomorrow Morning assembles a group of people who represents the world's current anarchy in a not first-class New York restaurant. They are intermittently aware of the audience, to which Mr. Harry Towb chats genially and which Mr. Alexis Kanner is compelled briefly to harangue. Mr. Kanner insists on serving Mr. Towb's dinner ; Puerto Rican kitchen-men emerge to spread anarchy ; a baby is born ; Mr. Towb has a mildly drunken conversation with Mr. Rex Garner's taxi-driver, and this is a piece of exquisitely precise timing to linger over in the memory. The baby, suddenly adult, announces the end of the world, but things slip back to normal.
Perhaps all this sounds pretentious. Perhaps with less vivid acting and a less startling virtuoso production, it would be pretentious in action, for Mr. Saroyan is a poet of profound simplicities who tends to inflate the simplicity and leave the profundity to look after itself. But Mr. Arthur Storch has provided the plays with finely varied and perfectly controlled tempi, raises a magnificent comic chaos and rejects all the temptations that are offered him to overstate. His production, with Mr. Sekka's finely shaded performance, Mr. de Marney dispensing mysterious authority in one play and farcical vigour in the other, and Mr. Towb's perfectly tactful, splendidly timed and quietly funny performance give the plays' wide vision an almost complete validity. Only when Mr. Towb and Mr. Kanner address the audience philosophically do we begin to wonder whether all is what it seems.
Papa you're just crazy
by Bernard Levin, Daily Mail, October 5th, 1962
Talking to You and Across the Board on Tomorrow Morning, by William Saroyan. Duke of York's.
It is hard to be cross with Mr. Saroyan. It is on the other hand, all too easy to get a pain from him.
He loves us all so much, and is so glad to be alive, and so glad that everybody else is alive that the effect can be a remarkably convincing feeling that one is developing a duodenal ulcer at a speed unprecedented in medical history.
Take this double-bill. The first shows us the usual crowd of Saroyan characters, some deaf, some blind and a fair sprinkling just crazy.
The negro boxer is good : he befriends the little deaf boy. The blind man is good too : he befriends the boxer. But the horrid man in the shirt is not good, though Mr. Saroyan would clearly hesitate before going so far as to say he was bad.
Anyway, when the midget policeman enters and stands on a table and shoots the boxer, I was reminded of the essay on Mr. Saroyan written by the late George Jean Nathan, called Is Saroyan crazy?
Speeches
The second play is much better. True, the characters are for the most part just as crazy, but the air of deliberate self-parody generated by Mr. Saroyan is, to start with, very funny.
The proprietor recites. "If you ever go across the sea to Ireland," the waiter philosophises hilariously, the Puerto Rican cooks make nationalist speeches with a lettuce in one hand and a knife in the other, and then Mr. Saroyan has to take the edge off it with a long coda on the nature of reality.
No matter : there are enough laughs in Across the Board to make up for its own nonsense, and almost for the nonsense in Talking to You.
And it is splendidly directed (by Mr. Arthur Storch) and acted, especially by Mr. Harry Towb, Mr Alexis Kanner (the latter in his first - but certainly not last - West End role) and Mr. Terence de Marney.
Wasn't it Mr. de Marney who once said he was in it for de Marney? Headline note: "Papa. You're crazy" - a novel by William Saroyan.
