TV REVIEWS : Alan Bates Revels in Simon Gray’s ‘Unnatural Pursuits’

Simon Gray and Alan Bates, the British playwright and actor who together gained acclaim in the early ‘70s with “Butley,” a blistering view of academia, are ripely reunited again in another dark comedy of a frayed, frazzled, intellectual outsider: “Unnatural Pursuits,” a stinging comic fantasy about a British playwright on tour in the United States with his beloved work-in-progress (A&E; Sunday, 5 and 9 p.m.).

Produced by the BBC in association with A&E;, this North American television premiere is a richly observant, always amusing, sometimes hilarious chronicle of a besotted, haunted, chain-smoking Brit dramatist named Hamish Partt (Bates, who’s in top, top form).

Compelled to open his latest and faintly damned play at a fringe theater in London, Partt, despite a doctor’s dire warnings about his liver, grabs at the chance to re-write his play at a small theater in L.A., which is a cozy art deco, onetime neighborhood movie house. Egged on by his over-the-top L.A. producer (wonderfully portrayed by Bob Balaban), Bates at first is the classic innocent abroad.

The ensuing palm-fringed L.A. scenes, with our intrepid playwright billeted with his booze and typewriter in a classic-’50s hotel-and-pool “Vertigo”-movie atmosphere, begins a crazy backstage journey that veers from L.A. to Dallas to ultimately ludicrous triumph in New York.

Gray’s semi-autobiographical odyssey (not very far removed from his characters’ literary bitchiness in “Butley” and “Quartermaine’s Terms”--strongly evokes Dylan Thomas’ and Brendan Behan’s disastrous, gin-soaked trips to America (not to mention that fine movie “Reuben, Reuben”).

Bates’ florid face and feverish eyes catch a man made all the more comically desperate for being snagged in an American nightmare, down to non-English-speaking maitre d’s, drop-dead-looking hotel hookers and a tipsy, sexually aggressive arts writer (Deborah Rush) who tills the theater beat in Dallas.

The result is a blown-up road map, complete with sublime musical turns a la “Pennies From Heaven,” not of glitzy Broadway or prestigious regional theater but of small theater’s trench warfare--the con and hype, the egos and huckstering producers who exploit Bates’ alternately bemused and harassed celebrity figure when the visiting playwright’s not, in fact, exploiting them. (One producer stiffs him with a $2,000 hotel liquor bill.)

Viewers should find the whole irrepressible adventure irresistible.