`SKYLIGHT' SHINES ON CHOICES IN LIFE.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Theater Critic

``I want you to change,'' one character tells another near the end of ``Skylight,'' David Hare's staggeringly well-written chamber play currently running at the Mark Taper Forum.

It's a literal request, made in the wee hours of the morning as two lovers find themselves mopping up the remains of a passionate, fateful reunion.

But in Hare's consummately skillful hands, this simple sentence becomes an infinitely poignant entreaty, a personal referendum on freedom and choice that resonates through an entire society.

Ever since David Hare came up from Cambridge University in 1968, he's been writing about the infinite ways in which public and private morality bedevil one another. With ``Skylight,'' he has taken that theme to a point of maximum illumination; director Robert Egan and two brilliant performers, Brian Cox and Laila Robins, do the rest.

At the play's heart is a relationship that's nearly as emotionally mine-laden as George and Martha's in ``Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?''

Tom Sergeant (Cox), a prosperous, middle-age London restaurateur, and his former employee Kyra Hollis (Robins), a schoolteacher 20 years his junior, are meeting for the first time since ending their love affair three years earlier. Tom's wife, Alice, recently has died of cancer, and the guilt-racked widower turns up unexpectedly one night at Kyra's unfashionable flat in northwest London in search of atonement.

Coincidentally, or not, he arrives just minutes after Kyra has received a surprise visit from Tom's 20-year-old son Edward (Michael Hall, in a brief but indelible appearance), an impulsive, likable young man seeking to make his own peace with Kyra.

From the moment he first comes blustering into Kyra's apartment, Cox's Tom is a gigantic stage presence, a cross between Falstaff in a business suit and the Royal Albert Hall. A ruddy Northerner with a boyish charm and a bulky physique, he moves with the grace that some big men possess, a bundle of raw nerve endings and highly compacted energy, with a basso profundo that's custom-made for ironic rejoinders.

Born working class, Tom has hauled himself up the free-market ladder, rung by entrepreneurial rung, while never looking back. It's beyond him why Kyra has become such a puritanical do-gooder, living in a frozen apartment and using her first-class college degree to teach underprivileged kids.

``It's only in this country that it's thought to be a crime to get on,'' Tom grumbles, perfectly framing one of the play's central conflicts between civic duty and private honor.

Holding one's own against a force of nature like Tom is no mean feat, but it's clear that Kyra has grown into a formidable person herself during their separation. Ferociously smart and eloquent, as Hare's women tend to be, she's fully capable of defending her lifestyle or launching a furious verbal counterattack.

As both characters struggle between the need to make amends and the need to move forward, Robins' feline self-possession checks Cox's booming charisma. They're perfect sparring partners: beautifully drawn, mesmerizingly realized and, in the end, equally sympathetic.

Rising from a slow boil to white-hot pitches of recrimination, then subsiding into little whirlpools of tenderness and caustic humor, ``Skylight'' has the rhythmic consistency of a thoughtful soap opera - George Bernard Shaw does ``Coronation Street.'' Only it's Shaw with a heart and gonads, a species of drama that exults in messy emotions and impure beliefs.

David Jenkins' set design is appropriately awash in telling domestic details. We can smell the onions and olive oil in the spaghetti dinner that Kyra whips up for herself and Tom, just as we seek reassurance in those brightly colored boxes of Typhoo tea and the orange spines of the Penguin Classics novels.

As the momentum passes back and forth between them, Tom and Kyra reverse the traditional roles of male and female, parent and child. What's ultimately being contested here isn't simply a love affair, or even a society's future, but two radically differing notions of reality.

To its great credit, and our vast pleasure, ``Skylight'' doesn't ask which of those notions is right or wrong, but what is the cost of abandoning either of them.

THE FACTS

What: ``Skylight.''

Where: Mark Taper Forum, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays; through Oct. 26.

Tickets: $29 to $37. Call [phone].

Our rating: Four Stars.

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Photo

Photo: Brian Cox plays prosperous, guilt-racked widower Tom Sergeant in ``Skylight.''