Los Angeles Times, October 6, 1984, by Dan Sullivan ----------------------------------------------------------- Ah, said the Emperor Franz II, on being told that a certain gentleman was a patriot--is he a patriot for me? In like manner, the question about British shows that come to the States with large reputations is--is it a show for us? John Osborne's *A Patriot for Me* works nicely at the Ahmanson--until intermission. Clearly it is a play with ice water in its veins. But Alan Bates is making us fell the agony of Alfred Redl, an idealistic young career officer irresistibly drawn to other men (the time is the early 1900s, the place Austro-Hungary), and director Ronald Eyre has mounted the piece superbly--as if it were a long- suppressed costume opera by some troubled compatriot of Dr. Freud. We get the darkness, the hypocrisy and the glamour of the period. Above all, there's a growing sense that something dire is in the air, some awful storm gathering to flush away all this decadence. This is exciting to one who remembers how flat *A Patriot for Me* was on Broadway in 1969. Eyre and Bates seem to have found what it wants to say, beyond the obvious things about repression, and one is about to decide that there is more to this play than once met the eye. After intermission, alas, it is all up for *A Patriot for Me.* Once our hero submits to his nature (for which he is instantly beaten up by some thugs), the tension of the play evaporates. The rest of the story chronicles Redl's decline, starting with a gloomy drag ball and ending with a gunshot. One thinks of Dorian Gray, except that he enjoyed being decadent. Redl doesnot--the one thing about him that Osborne sems to admire. Bates has an almost insuperable problem here: to make vivid a morose man who becomes more and more a stranger to himself with every fall from grace. He falls into two fine rages (at his first woman and his latest young man) and that is the limit of his expressive range. Within that range, Bates does some lovely, subtle things; but an unhappy stoic does not give an actor very many notes to play, especially in a house so unconducive to subtlety as the Ahmanson, which has never seemed darker and colder. As his Redl dims out, so does our interest in the play. By this time, too, some of Eyre's and designer Carl Toms' visual devices are becoming familiar (the revolving stage, bringing on yet another sidewalk cafe; the ghostly gray-and- white background screens; the ominous whistling theme by Ilona Sekacz). Worse, the speeches are sounding more and more like speeches, read with the proper British starch (especially by Harry Andrews as a gruff general and George Rose as a swish baron) but not necessarily adding to our understanding of the characters. Osborne himself, seems to want to dismiss them as a tained and pompous lot, living under a code that would shrivel anybody's soul. At the same time, he doesn't come out and attack them--which might have given the play some energy. Rather, he plays the objective Brechtian clinician, letting the data speak for itself. We read ahead, we agree that there is probably a connection between a workshiop of the iron-man ethic and the world of the drag ball, and we wish that the speaker would conclude. *A Patriot for Me* will never get a better production on these shores. Indeed, it may not have had a better one in England. The cast, partly drawn from the Chichester Festival production, is enormous and convincing. We're drawn into the world of the play, from its spies (George Murcell, June Ritchie--who has some honest feelings for the frozen Redl) to its nursemaids and newsboys. We meet some particularly affecting victims of that world, starting with David Yelland, waiting at dawn to begin a duel that he knows will kill him--not at all a cliche as he and Bates (and later Nicolas Gecks) play the scene. But as Eyre's cast takes its final frozen bow on the revolving stage, the image of figures in a waxworks exhibit is all too appropriate. *A Patriot for Me* will be at the Ahmanson through Nov. 25. ----------------------------------------------------------- Bentley's Bedlam http://www.BetsyDa.com/bedlam.html This website is for information and entertainment purposes only and is not intended to infringe on copyrights held by others.