The Times
15 October 1975
Leonard Buckley

Everybody on trial

"ANY OF YOUR cases interesting?" the lunchtime mistress asked the barrister as she clung with a desperate brightness to their dying affair. "Only if you're interested in mess and defeat," he replied. You could have taken this brief exchange as comment on this play as a whole. Simon Gray did not give us characters last night to engage our sympathy or to command our respect. The barrister was jaded. His mistress was tiresome and his wife was wrapped up in her academic job. We might have warmed to their son, but, in the manner of 16-year-olds, he was hostile and withdrawn. These characters were true enough. But there was nobody we could really like.

With that settled early on, we could sit back to enjoy the performance. This was an alpha exercise in gamma minus people. We could savour it episode by episode as the scenes changed jerkily like the slides in a magic lantern show. Glimpses of the barrister's professional work gave substance to the title, but for Mr Gray the private life of his characters was all in a courtroom too. Everybody was on trial and the verdict was going against the lot.

It was a play of literate bickering and bedroom frustration. And wth the author's clever dialogue it was all most civilized. When the wife exploded momentarily into violence or when later the barrister's pupil dropped dead after a game of squash, we were less concerned with the human tragedy than with the evident breach of good manners. That was the sort of people they were.

The people, however, were all beautifully acted, from Dinsdale Landen's confidential friend who allowed the barrister opportunities to examine himself, to Georgina Hale as his mistress, Rosemary McHale as his wife, and Daniel St George as the son. Alan Bates as the barrister dominated the proceedings as was intended. You could not help wondering how quickly in the intimacy of television you might tire of the thoughtful stare and the loaded pause that are his chief mannerisms. But in the short hour of this "Play for Today" he used both to brilliant effect.

The Sunday Times
19 October 1975
Peter Lennon

Visual Aid

THERE ARE TIMES, after weeks of a skimpy television diet, when I am tempted to follow the example of th Zoological Gardens and hang a sign on my set: "Please stop feeding scraps to us animals." Then television bustles about, shows a willingness to do some of the things it is best fitted to do, and I cheer up.

In lesser hands Simon Gray's play -- "Plaintiffs and Defendants" (Play for Today, BBC1) -- about a tense few days in the life of a barrister (Alan Bates), whose neurotic mistress (Georgina Hale) begins to claw her way threateningly close to his comparatively satisfactory domestic life, could have unravelled, become slack and missed its most vital quality: tension. Michael Lindsay-Hogg took this assured and intelligent piece of writing and gave it the surgical style and tautness it needed.

It was admirably directed. Lindsay-Hogg pruned the play slightly (the text is in the current issue of "The New Review") and used two very effective devices to create a sense of tension, and of disaster only barely contained. He used the jump-cut discreetly but with devastating effect: the barrister thinking apprehensively of his mistress smiles wanly at his assistant and is instantly in the woman's distressing presence. When she goes briefly berserk the camera remains still and allows her, a bed-sitter recluse, only the length of her mantel-piece to rampage up and down. Very good author-director teamwork: excellent performances from Alan Bates and Georgina Hale, and from Rosemary McHale as the determinedly reasonable wife who has premonitions of domestic disaster.

Further Reading: Sheridan Morley interview with Bates and Gray

"It was Alan Bates who played the messy, destructive, middle-aged teacher in "Butley." Written by Simon Gray, a university teacher himself, the play opened four years ago, and became a long-running success. Bates has now come to represent the archetypal Gray hero -- and this week he is in the first of two new television plays by Gray. Actor and playwright have established a rare working partnership ..."