TEA AND SYMPATHY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 949, 18 October 1957, Page 17

TEA AND SYMPATHY

(M.G.M.-CinemaScope) _ R: 16 and over only F, like me, you had been trying this week to keep one eye on John van Druten’s young Woodley and t’other on Robert Anderson’s Tom Lee, you might have found it easy to agree with the perceptive M. Alphonse Karr that the more things change the more they remain the same. They do change, of course. It’s difficult, re-reading Young Woodley today, to understand why it initially came under the ban of the Lord Chamberlain -save that it introduced sex to the austere precincts of the English public school. In style and language, in the conventions which harass the characters -even the thoughts which torment young Woodley himself-it belongs to a generation more inhibited if not more innocent than our own. To a public which has assimilated Kinsey and accustomed itself to those vagaries of human behaviour which mass observation has revealed and the American theatre in particular has exploited, Young Woodley would sound a little naive. For this generation something: more ominous than simple heartbreak is apparently needed to capture attention. The miseries of loneliness and shyness must be augmented by the public humiliations of persecution; the nonconformity of the intellectual in the herd of extroverts (young Woodley wrote verse, young Lee sings folk songs), must be emphasised by the suggestion that the nonconformity is also physical. Thesé elements, admittedly, add much to the impact of Tea and Sympathy and give it an acrid mid-century flavour. (The dilemma of Tom’s room-mate and friend Al is an economical indictment ' of a society which has submitted to the principle of guilt by association.) But if something new has been added, the framework of the play is startlingly similar to van Druten’s. In each the central character is an adolescent schoolboy suffering from maternal deprivation, who turns for consolation and affection to his housemastfr’s wife. The wife in each case is herself young, childless, frustrated and emotionally at, odds with her husband. In each case the husband is her second choice; in both plays the boy seeks to break out of the emotional impasse by having. an affair with a local trollop. . . Though there are varia’

tions of detail, the similarities are more striking than the differences. Only a slight relaxing of the conventions distinguishes Laura Simmons from Laura Reynolds. And yet, in spite’ of the feeling that I had encountered it all before, in spite of some unevenness in the playing, in spite of an unnecessary absolving epilogue (which quite destroyed the falling cadence of a good curtain-line), Tea and Sympathy moved me at times quite profoundly. It did not, admittedly, come so close to humdrum experience as Marty but the feelings of compassion which it inspired were of the same undiscriminating kind-pity for the boy, fer the wife, for the shocked and uncomprehending father; most of all, perhaps, for the husband, struck down in the citadel of his own vanity. Save for the tasteless epilogue, I had little fault to find with Robert Ander-. son’s screenplay. Such excisions as have been made are of material which (on my reading of the play at least) is expendable; and I have no quarrel at all with Minelli’s direction, which treats young Tom as the victim of pressures from. outside rather than from withinlike a prisoner who breaks down under persistent suggestion and in the end is persuaded of his own guilt. I could have wished, though, that Minelli had got farther away from the physical limitations of stage settings. Almost all the players impressed me at one time or another, though I didn’t find any one continuously persuasive. Of the three principals (all from the stage production), Deborah Kerr struck me as the most consistently good; and John Kerr (not so good at the emotional peaks of his part) will_have the indulgence of all who recall the agonies of adolescence. Leif Erickson plays the housemaster a shade too broadly most of the time, yet of the three he achieves a deeper note of tragedy. Tea and Sympathy, in short, was well worth making and is well worth seeing. It is, of course, a film for adults but-as one American critic said of the play-it might also make adults of some who venture to see it.