STAGE REVIEW : Making a Milquetoast of Lord Byron

“Still,” said my companion, “it’s worth the whole show to hear Derek Jacobi read ‘So, We’ll Go No More a Roving.’ ”

You will gather that there are problems with “Byron--Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know” in its American premiere at the Doolittle Theatre. There are so many problems that one hardly knows where to begin.

So let’s choose a moment of communication. Towards the end of the evening, Jacobi, as Lord Byron, recalls Shelley’s cremation on a lonely Italian beach, the poet’s body transformed into a stew of hissing fluids and cracked bone.

The memory is all too vivid to Byron, and the actor simply metes it out, letting the images do their work. And suddenly we see a man confronting his own mortality.

Elsewhere--problems. The first one, and probably the determining one, is the script, devised by Jane McCulloch for a group called the English Chamber Theatre. “When I set out to write this play,” McCulloch tells us in a program note, “I realized I had taken on an almost impossible task. To reduce to two hours the life and work of Lord Byron!”

It does seem risky. Particularly if you don’t have any opinions about Lord Byron. McCulloch did come up with a two-hour entertainment based on Byron’s life and poetry, but in no sense did she create a play. Instead we get a staged encyclopedia article, with the names and dates correctly stated, and with appropriate brief citations from Byron’s verse--the juvenilia, “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,” “Childe Harold,” “Don Juan” and, especially, the lyrics.

But what Byron’s life added up to, what its dramatic line was, what McCulloch thinks of him personally--are undetermined. He was interested in women. McCulloch will go that far. And it may be thematic that actress Isla Blair portrays all the women in Byron’s life, from his mother to his last Italian countess, as if they were the same woman, a charming hostess with no inner life whatsoever.

However, the character’s real function seems to be to hurry along the story from London to Venice to Greece, so that we won’t miss the next episode in Byron’s life--just at the moment when we were beginning to discern the significance of this episode. We always seem to be running for the next train.

Jacobi is in the same predicament. Rarely does he have time to build a moment: a moment, literally, is all he gets. The actor does, however, have some ideas about Lord Byron. He sees him as a little boy who never grew up, a cousin to Jacobi’s TV Hamlet.

We had something more sardonic, more “Byronic” in mind. But that’s cliche, we tell ourselves. Let’s see where this approach will lead. In the early scenes, the vulnerability seems valid and true. But eventually it comes to seem a cliche of its own--the poet as milksop.

The quivering lower lip. The wounded eye. The mouth that can only whisper its pain. Where Shelley fell upon the thorns of life, Jacobi’s Byron leaps upon them. Not improperly either. As a practicing romantic, Byron was ready to melt on call. But he was a man of fabulously mixed temperament and for dramatic variety we need to see more of the other Byrons, including the cruel one. No one would find Jacobi’s Byron either mad, bad or dangerous to know.

The verse is, of course, well spoken, with particular regard for the long vowels--one can see why the 14-year-old Tennyson mourned Byron’s death. Unfortunately the script also calls upon Jacobi and Blair to sing many of the lyrics (to melodies by Donald Fraser and Francesca Robertson.) To be tactful, singers they are not. Why not just speak the lyrics over the taped piano accompaniment?

The set consists of a few wicker chairs, a Greek column and a straw rug. Perhaps this is to remind us that Byron spent his last years on foreign shores, but to a Californian it reads like a window display at Cost Plus. Transferring a simple little platform show from England to America is more complicated than it looks.

“Byron” marks the beginning of Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson’s first season at the Doolittle, the next event being “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” with Glenda Jackson and John Lithgow Oct. 5. What a pleasure to have a CTG/Ahmanson show that isn’t miked! But not a pleasure unalloyed.

Plays at 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, with Thursday, Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2. Tickets $25-$31. Closes Sept. 17. 1615 N. Vine St. (213) 410-1062 or (714) 634-1300.