Adultery is Next to Godlessness: Dramatic Juxtaposition in Peter Nichols's Passion Play

Adultery is Next to Godlessness: Dramatic Juxtaposition in Peter Nichols's Passion Play JUNE SCHLUETER In the past several years, the London theatre has experienced a diffusion of the intense politicism that characterized its fringe in the late 1960's and early 1970'S. Though the same generation ofplaywrights remains the lifeblood ofthe contemporary stage and politics are often its concern, the political spine that gave structure to the theatre of a decade ago has splintered into sinews of dramatic subjects, not the least of which is sex. Yet while those playwrights who favor sexual politics over just-plain politics have a ready market in both London and New York, some of the most dramatically interesting plays have come from those who have transcended the Neil Simon version of sex that has dominated the contemporary theatre. Harold Pinter, for example, would seem an unlikely reviver of the "eternal triangle," yet this veteran British playwright turned a play about adultery into one ofthe conversation pieces ofthe seventies. Betrayal, which dramatizes in reverse the nine-year love affair of a man with his best friend's wife, suggests the formal challenge of the contemporary playwright who sees sex as a legitimate dramatic subject but is unprepared to reduce it to a Simonesque smirk or a class in Fellatio 101. One of the more technically ambitious treatments of adultery in recent years is Peter Nichols's Passion Play, which opened in London in January of 1981. Like the subject of Pinter's Betrayal, that of Passion Play is infidelity, between husband and wife and between friends. James Croxley has been married to Eleanor for twenty-five years, during which time there have been no sexual transgressions on his part. But Kate, who is rebounding from an affair with the recently deceased Albert, finds James attractive and begins the seduction that will culminate in the affair, the discovery, and the ultimatum. Intimacies multiply as James learns that Eleanor also had an affair with Albert, and Eleanor and AJbert's wife, Agnes, make the women who have betrayed them their confidantes. Though the situation is the standard fare of sexual comedy, Nichols's strategic use of dramatic juxtaposition offers a perspective Peter Nichols's Passion Play 541 on faith and infidelity that an audience seasoned to on- and off-stage adultery does not expect. By the end of the play, it is clear that adultery is Nichols's metaphor for the essential emptiness of a godless world. The most unusual dramatic device that Nichols uses is that of the double characterlactor, through which Jim materializes as James's alter ego and Nell as Eleanor's, enabling the audience to know the thoughts of the central characters while others on stage do not. Though London Times reviewer Irving Wardle expressed amazement that no one had employed such dramatic doubles before,' both Eugene O'Neill and Brian Friel have, ofcourse, done so. O'Neill, in Days Without End (1932), dramatizes the moral division between "John," representing the good half of the self, and "Loving," representing the evil, splitting his central character into warring halves in a battle over religious faith. Similarly, Friel, in Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), employs two actors, one designated "Public" and the other "Private," to examine the emotional contlict of his central character, Gareth O'Donnell, on the eve of his departure for America. Nichols's creation of the double character, like those of O'Neill and Friel, suggests the dramatist's attempt to get beneath the surface of his characters to the subtext, where the intentions that impel action reside. But in Nichols's play, Jim and Nell not only illuminate the characters of James and Eleanor, but acquire lives of their own, turning the subtext of the play into the central action. Although there is little incompatibility of character between James and Jim (they work together admirably well), Jim turns out to be the more interesting of the two. The alter ego of the man who beds both wife and mistress appears on the scene the moment that James's deception begins. Having returned home from lunch with Kate, James is uncertain about what to tell Eleanor, until Jim materializes to...