Butley slouches his way to fame

By Allan Wallach

NEW YORK Ben Butley slouches into his scruffy college office, his eyes hollow, his clothes rumpled, a razor cut on his face which is imperfectly hidden by adhesive. He takes a halfeaten banana from the pocket of his plastic raincoat, flings the coat across the room and, one bite later, hurls the banana after it. The center isn't holding; his world is flying apart and it is characteristic of Butley that he speeds it along with malicious wisecracks and romance games he is destined to lose.

He is the title character and emotional center of Simon Gray's "Butley," which arrived at the Morosсо theater preceded by superlatives.

The play had been extravagantly praised in London and, as has happened so often with other imports, it more than lives up to the advance rotices. "Butley” is a savagely funny play, with an undertone of sadness and loss behind every laugh.

In a narrow sense, Ben Butley is the joint creation of Gray and Alan Bates, who played the role originally in London and is starring in the restaged Broadway production. Gray has written a character of such complexity and dimension it demands nothing less than a performance of major stature. And Bates is providing that performance.

There has been nothing quite like it on Broadway in some time, although if you're casting about for comparisons the self-destructive figure acted by Nicol Williamson in "Inadmissible Evidence" several seasons ago is a good point of reference. Butley is equally self-destructive, but he is a man who's going down laughing, and Bates finds a cutting edge in every sardonic remark sharp enough to produce both laughter and pain.

LIKE GRAY himself, Butley is a teacher of English literature in a college of London University and an admirer of T. S. Eliot. Butley, however, has lost his taste for teaching and he spends much of his time avoiding the students who come to him for tutorials. He shares his dingy office, as well as his flat, with a soft and obsequious young teacher named Joey.

Joey is a homosexual who appears to be Butley's lover, although Gray has made their relationship ambiguous enough to leave a very small shadow of doubt. (Gray himself created some of the doubt in a recent interview.)

On this dismal day when even Butley's razor has gone out of control, he is to learn of two "divorces": His short marriage to Anne is to be terminated, and Joey is moving in with a young publisher named Reg. Of the two endings, the second is the mor e traumatic.

FOR ANNE, Butley has only a small measure of contempt. "She said if I were half a man I'd leave," he gibes, "but on discovering that she was, she left herself."

For Joey, he summons up all the rage and scorn at his command, and Butley is a

man with enormous command of both. His life, emptied of feeling for his vocation, has become a form of theater and the faculty members and students simply supporting players to be dominated.

Until now Joey was easily dominated but, as sometimes occurs in such relationships, the softer figure wins. Butley lashes out at

Reg's lower-lass origins and at Joey's toadying behavior toward anyone who can help him. "BUTLEY," which was directed in London by Harold Pinter, has been admirably staged for Broadway by

James Hammerstein with an exemplary new cast

and an appropriately dreary setting by Eileen Diaz. Hayward Morse is ex-

cellent as Joey, the not-toocompliant pawn in the power struggle, and Roger Newman is fine in the smaller part of Reg. There are good performances by Holland Taylor as Anne, Barbara Lester as Edna (a rather pathetic faculty member), and Geraldine Sherman as an eager student

LA Times/Washington Post Service