BACALL IN ‘YOUTH’: APPROVING CHIRPS

“When monster meets monster, one has to give way and it will never be me!” A Tennessee Williams line, if we ever heard one. Imagine it spoken by Lauren Bacall.

We won’t have to imagine it for too long. Bacall plans to bring “Sweet Bird of Youth” to the States after she’s finished playing it in London, where her performance as the fading movie queen Alexandra del Lago has brought mostly gratifying reviews.

“She looks magnificent--so magnificent as to be almost a denial of the play’s theme,” wrote Kenneth Hurren in the Mail on Sunday. “In her presence, an audience is as helpless as iron filings. “

“Square-shouldered and sequinned, she gives us a self-aware monster,” wrote the Guardian’s Michael Billington. “Her rapt concern with news of her screen triumph reminded me of a Los Angeles sketch where an actor returned to find his house, his wife attacked, his family petrified . . . only to ask, ‘Did my agent call?”’

Punch’s Sheridan Morley thought Bacall served up “an even mix of Lady Macbeth and the Lady of the Camelias.” The Daily Telegraph’s John Barber found her “not the greatest actress in the world . . . but there is no denying her looping, lynx-eyed, imperious charisma. . . .”

Others found the charisma a bit overpowering. Benedict Nightingale in the New Statesman: “The question, or so it appears to me, is whether she’s also an actress. If the specifications for that particular job include delving below the visible crust and investigating the hidden geology of character, then she wouldn’t seem particularly well qualified for it.”

As for Williams’ 1959 play, which hadn’t been seen in London before, Michael Coveney of the Financial Times found it “one of Williams’ very best,” while Nightingale called it “a good bad play” and thought that director Harold Pinter had got “full value” out of it.

For Hurren, the play was “bunk” redeemed by a great star. “Bacall, or nothing at all.”

The Mark Taper Forum’s recent “Imagining a Future” program reminded us how few playwrights have tried to imagine nuclear holocaust. (Arthur Kopit’s “The End of the World . . . With Symposium to Follow” is about the difficulty of doing just that.)

Now from Australia comes word on a play that dares to visualize the effect of a nuclear blast on an average household. Presented in Sydney by a group called Company B, Richard Briggs’ “When the Wind Blows” opens with a retired London couple obediently shoring up their home against a possible enemy bombing, as they did during the Blitz.

The blast comes and they survive it. But no government pamphlet can prepare them for the aftermath. “With light enough to see, the devastation of their simple home is overwhelming,” writes Variety’s Sydney correspondent.

“As realization comes that their faith in the powers-that-be is misplaced, they seek to comfort each other with all but forgotten prayers and psalms. They know they are dying slowly.”

“It is a much more persuasive anti-nuclear argument than many a more pretentious piece. Its very honesty merits widest possible dissemination.”

QUOTE OF THE WEEK. Prince, in Rolling Stone: “I write a lot and I cut a lot.”