Tony Richardson | A Delicate Balance / 1973

the next invasion

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edward Albee (screenplay, based on his stage drama), Tony Richardson (director) A Delicate Balance / 1973

 

After a deadly quiet meal, ending, apparently, in a chocolate mousse, Agnes (Katharine Hepburn) rings for the coffee before following her husband Tobias (Paul Scofield) into their well-to-do living room for a late-night drink. Swathed in a beautifully mocha-dotted satin gown, the imperious hostess expresses her fears—that one day she might simply lose control—as she steers her little family safely into port through the several storms that trouble their lives: the increasing distance she senses between herself and her husband, her daughter Julia’s (Lee Remick) serial marriages, and her sister Claire’s (Kate Reid) alcoholism. Tobias assures her she will not, perhaps perceiving that Agnes, the strongest of them all, has already lost control in the sense that that harbor they are about to reach is a rotting port surrounded with gigantic rocks.

 

     Claire, who has waited upstairs apparently until she might come down for a drink, appears, angering the suspicious and slightly jealous sister—as well she might, given that we soon sense that Tobias is now closer to Claire than to his wife, clearly preferring Claire’s company. For despite her tippling, she is a Cassandra, a seer and speaker of truth who recognizes that she is not so much “an alcoholic”—as she has been ordered to describe herself at an AA meeting she briefly attended—as someone who drinks both so that she can see and because of what she does see.

       When Agnes returns to announce what Claire has already predicted, that Julia is now finished with her fourth marriage and will be temporarily returning home, we almost expect Claire to mouth the Margo Channing quip from All About Eve: “Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!” But she remains silent, as she downs another brandy into her gullet. The central solution to this family’s dilemmas, in fact, is to remain calm, to turn to silence instead of speaking openly of their problems. When Agnes talks it is generally obliquely, laced equally with self-pity and self-mockery; she deludes herself, moreover, that all the decisions and where she determines to steer them are really Tobias’ choices.

      Before Julia even arrives in an attempt to reclaim her upstairs bedroom kept open for her returns, friends of the couple, Harry (Joseph Cotton) and Edna (Betsy Blair), suddenly appear on their doorstep. Even though Agnes and Tobias are startled at their arrival, these friends are hospitably invited in for a drink, as Agnes attempts to illicit the reason for their late-night stop. “Have they been at the local country club?”

     It is finally up to Claire to silence her by pointing out the fact that Harry is attempting to explain their sudden visitation. He was reading a book and his wife was doing needlepoint when suddenly they experienced a “vast, nameless terror” which forced them to flee their house. They have, clearly, not come for a visit but to stay with Agnes and Tobias, permanently perhaps.

     Inexplicably, Agnes quickly capitulates, leading them to Julia’s room. When Julia finally shows up, she is given Tobias’ room, while the husband and wife are once again forced to share their own bed.

    Albee never makes clear precisely what sort of ghosts are haunting the interlopers or what the true relationships are between the two couples now in cohabiting the upscale Connecticut suburban house. Claire has hinted that during one “hot July” both men may have shared a mistress. But we know little else. It doesn’t truly matter, for in Albee’s works the art often lies in its mysteries. Surely the demons terrorizing Harry and Edna, and now affecting the lives of Agnes and Tobias as well as their small “family,” concerns their recognitions of their failures and sins of omission.

      Tobias spends most of the evening sitting up and simply thinking to himself, but by the light of dawn the totally selfish Julia is fulminating about not being able to move back into own room, and Agnes is sarcastically wondering about what might be their “next invasion.”

      When Harry and Edna finally reappear, much later, it is only so that they might quickly return home to pack up some of their clothing. So does Albee once again mix a kind of absurdly funny wit with a horror tale.

      Upon their return, Tobias tells the couple that they are welcome, suggesting that if they cannot be allowed to be taken in, in time of such doubts, there can be no such thing as friends—a concept that brings up even stranger questions such as what are friends, and how do they connect with love or how might they be fitted into marriage? And, of course, there are so many more unsaid things such as the secret sexual connections between the two men; while Agnes and Edna seem to be oceans apart, the men seem to share something they cannot talk about. Does sharing club membership give equal permission to move into the members’ bedrooms? While Pinter might have needled both characters and audience with these questions, Albee basically glosses over them, like dropping a pearl without bothering to seek it out. It is the audience’s job to see to where the pearl has rolled and what the significance of that destination might be.

      Claire, now given open freedom to drink during the increasing crises, remains strangely silent—only now and then offering a subtle insight or mocking their entire crisis by bringing out her accordion to play them a jolly death dance.

     But the whole situation is made even more absurd by the fact that when the visiting couple does return, they just as suddenly determine to go back home, their crisis evidently having passed, with Tobias even more inexplicably attempting to plead with Harry to stay. Perhaps life with the friends might, at least, have been more interesting than Agnes’ attempts for to maintain their “delicate balance.”

      In Tony Richardson’s “canned-theater” version, filmed in only two rooms of a small British country house pretending to be an American suburban WASP enclave, much of the original humor is sucked up into the seriousness of the project’s intent (this film was part of a well-intentioned Ely A. Landau program to make world theater available on film).

     Yet, with a cast to die for one can perhaps endure a bit of embalming. Although Hepburn’s always impressive hauteur works well for the grand Agnes, it is Scofield and Reid who particularly stand out here—although just to see the face of Cotton once again upon the screen is a true pleasure. But it might have been interesting to see the true fireworks of a performance with the originally cast Kim Stanley (in Reid’s role)—who evidently so clashed with Hepburn’s acting style and manners that the great film actress had Stanley fired. One can only imagine how the Actors Studio vs. BBC, or, once again, as in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, brusque theatrical professionalism vs. pure gut response, might have played out. If nothing else, it could have put some more life and fun into this mostly sour-faced production.

     Albee is not Williams, clearly, Albee being a far more determined-to-be-profound playwright. But I always have felt that under Albee’s horror of human relationships there is often lurking a kind a truly American camp sensibility that, given his upper-crust childhood, to which Albee could never admit. Sometimes, I think, if only he might have gotten out of his darkened or even sunlit drawing rooms and walked back to that bench in the park, Albee might have found a real world that was hilariously silly. He later did manage to find a lovely goat in the middle of a field so enchanting a husband that he was willing to give up everything for love.

      And what will be the “next invasion” upon the walled-up family terrified of the barbarians upon their doorstep. Tobias and Claire alone know the answer, “Don’t bother to let them in, they’re already here.”

 

Los Angeles, February 4, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2016).