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Reviewed by Gordon Gow in FILMS and FILMING, May 1976 * THERE IS A QUIP in Simon Gray's stage play "Butley" about "preserving the unities": an acknowledgement that, even in terms of theatre, the concentration of meaningful events into a single day and in just one room was taking dramatic license as near to its limit as modern drama will permit. When the point is made now in the film version (adapted by Gray himself), it could almost be taken as an apology. Yet no apology is needed. In the first place the avowed aim of the batch of productions that are offered under the label 'British Film Theatre' is to make good plays available to a wider public, and in doing so to be rather strictly faithful to the original text. But secondly and more importantly, this has not resulted in the effect of a photographed play, or in other words of theatre at second-hand, such as we have seen in well-meant but hardly filmic 'recordings' of -- for example -- the National Theatre's "Othello" and the Royal Ballet's "Romeo and Juliet." To transport a stage company, and the sets as well, to a film studio for a week or so, and grab whatever visual compositions seem most felicitous while leaving the performances more or less alone, is not enough. 'British Film Theatre' does much better than that. Nevertheless, in its textual fidelity especially, it sometimes runs a risk of seeming a bit on the stagey side. This risk is twice evident in "Butley" -- and twice evaded by the wisdom of all concerned. On the brink of hysteria I have picked upon "Butley" to make this point about the whole group of films because this is the only one among them whose director is new to cinema. We know Harold Pinter to be a major playwright and a skilled director of plays on the stage. We ought not to be surprised that he proves now to have the necessary blend of instinct and objectivity to make a really thoroughgoing film: after all, he has written screenplays too, based on other writings than his own at times. But his aptitude is in fact pretty remarkable here on account of the aforementioned risks. The first of them becomes apparent from the moment Alan Bates as Ben Butley opens his mouth to speak his first lines. The delivery is flamboyant, extravagant, theatrical: a kind of speech acceptable in a theatre but usually artificial beyond redemption in the cinema. Bates, one feels, is 'repeating' the characterisation he originated on the stage. Buy why isn't he applying his proven awareness of the difference in size of acting between a performance designed to reach the furthermost seat in a theatre and a performance geared to the closer range of a film camera? Why hasn't Pinter, in any case, required him to fine it down? We are not far into the film before the answer becomes clear. This is very probably the only way Ben Butley can be played. What seemed true on the stage is just as true on the screen, because Butley is a man on the brink of hysteria, living at fever pitch, his every impulse carrying him further on the route to self-destruction; and of course his unfailing wit, upon which the black comedy of Gray's concept thrives so fully, is charged with venom that undermines not only his relationships with other people but his own slender chances of survival, let alone of fulfilling any ambition. A malingerer of sorts, he neglects his job as a tutor in English literature at London University, fobbing off students with improvised excuses, and his intention to write a book on T. S. Eliot is fading into oblivion. Butley's clouded mind, beset by constant self-reproach that is barely hidden and by alcoholism that he scarcely takes the trouble to conceal any more, wastes away in shrewish jest while Eliot's photograph curls down from the wall in limp condemnation. If Butley's day were not presented to us as comedy, then, we would find it intolerable. As it is the pace is killing in at least two senses of the term. Butley's former star pupil Joey, now an assistant lecturer who shares his office and indeed his residence, is breaking off both alliances because he has found a likelier lover, who indeed shows up and gives Butley the punch in the belly that he has been begging for. This homosexual triangle is only one of the day's trials. Others are the declaration by Butley's estranged wife that she plans a second marriage, to a man he particularly dislikes, and the agitation of a lesbian colleague at the university, whom he has half-unwittingly offended by virtually stealing one of her seminar students during a drunken and evidently most unguarded conversation. Pressures building up So the day goes on, hilariously, horrifically, within the oppressive walls of Butley's office. Except, that is, for the moments occupied dangerously but triumphantly by the second of the risks: the opening-out of the play, which means showing us what happened before the curtain rose on Act One, and what happened during the interval. Here Pinter gives us wholly cinematic realism: Butley waking with a hangover, wretchedly discovering that his aerosol shaving foam has run dry, bleakly waiting for his train at Kilburn Park, and then aboard the tube, hawking and coughing, incongruously absorbed in the pages of "Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes;" at lunch time he sits morosely in a pub. Otherwise, beyond small excursions into corridor and toilet, the action is restricted as it was in the theatre to Butley's shoddy office. The risk lies in allowing any opening-out at all, for it is dangerous to accentuate the confinement of that single main set. Yet, rendered utterly realistic (art director, Carmen Dillon), the room becomes all the more effectively claustrophobic because we have been allowed just a glimpse beyond it; and its mean walls intensify the sense of pressures building up -- the place is like a cell. [Editor's note: the "cell" used was Simon Gray's actual office at Queen Mary College; and in fact Gray has a Hitchcockian appearance -- he is the academic going into the office next door.] Retreat is impossible So both risks are turned to advantage. Moreover, given an excellent cinematographer (Gerry Fisher), Pinter slyly plays upon the limitations of composition. In a telling silence (such as is found very often in plays he has written himself), he cuts back and forth between the faces of Butley and his bitter wife. As a student reads her ostentatious essay on "The Winter's Tale," the camera moves upward, striving for an overhead shot but proving that retreat is impossible and that Butley is cooped up with his irritations. When the lesbian colleague sits at Butley's desk her face is at first obscured from us by a hinged desk lamp which she pushes aside, the better to confront Butley with her wrath -- and, if memory serves, Pinter employed this same gesture in his stage production, but the placement of lamp and actress within the frame enables him to make more of it in the 'language' of cinema. Most subtle of all, however, is the way that blow to the stomach is subjectively matched by a sudden tilting of the frame as Butley is thrown off balance: a filmic device that has stretched from the study of the epileptic doctor in Duvivier's "Un carnet de bal" (1937), through the suspense of Reed's "The Third Man" (1949), to the rip-snorting onsets of villainy in the television "Batman" series, is deftly used again for an effect beyond the live theatre's means. The colour quality of the print I saw was given, alas, to the occasional disconcerting judder from grey-blue to something in the amber range: no help at all. Everything else was fine, including the supporting performances, especially those of Jessica Tandy and of two splendid actors from the original cast, Richard O'Callaghan and Michael Byrne. Bates, of course, is terrific. ||| * "Butley" was one of eight films in the American Film Theatre's 1973-74 premiere season. The UK release, as the BRITISH film Theatre, came in 1976.