AT FREDDIES by Penelope Fitzgerald (Godine: $14.95)....

AT FREDDIES by Penelope Fitzgerald (Godine: $14.95). The Freddie of this English theatrical novel’s title is an aged woman who operates a school for young Shakespeareans just off Covent Garden in a tatty area on the edge of London’s West End theater district. How this wan little book found its way to an American publisher is something of a mystery, since it trades in the new presumably witty and charming foibles of the British theater at its most trivial. Unlike the Charles Paris detective novels by Simon Brett, which use London theatrical bitchery and backstage gossip as a glorious bedrock on which to hand amateur cloak-and-dagger antics, “At Freddies” is really consumed with the doings of the school and its various employees and students. There are a pair of almost-plots--one concerning two students and their differing pursuits of a small part in “King John,” the other a love story about two pitifully lonely, lost faculty members--and an overriding concern about the school’s financial future, if any. The author, Penelope Fitzgerald, trades on the English fondness for tradition--a love of outmoded and eccentric characters and ways of life that belongs to an aristocratic viewpoint, and that is unlikely to cause much of a stir on this side of the Atlantic. There are some charming moments, and some reasonably worthy characterizations of the flotsam and jetsam of humanity that runs aground at Freddies, but even at 214 pages, the gentle whimsy of “At Freddie’s” wears out its welcome.