Someone Who'll Watch Over Me.

It is one of the platitudes of theater criticism that straight plays--selected comedies excepted--cannot survive on Broadway. Yet Frank McGuinness's Someone Who'll Watch over Me, which I saw in early December, is still playing. McGuinness, an Irish playwright not widely known in this country, has set his play in a basement, an improvised cell, in an unidentified country in the Middle East. As the play begins there are two prisoners--an Irishman (Stephen Rea, recently nominated for an Oscar in The Crying Game) and a black American (James McDaniel)--and they will be joined in the second act by an Englishman (Alec McCowen). They have apparently been picked up at random, but the playwright, more calculating than the hostage holders, has clearly selected the three men for their nationalities as well as their personalities. The Irishman is garrulous, mixing jokes and whines, a bit randy, a man who has moved around the globe seeking not only jobs but release from the confines of the domesticity he now misses. The Englishman is prim, buttoned-up, his natural standoffishness heightened by his mourning for his wife, whose death has led him to sign on as a teacher far from his comfortable English surroundings. The American, the character with whom the playwright is least comfortable, is direct, straightforward, reading the Bible, and exercising regularly in the hopes that he can keep sound in mind and body until his release.

Although the American is killed and the Irishman eventually released, leaving the Englishman crouched and alone, chained, as they all have been, to his corner of the cell, the play has very little plot. It consists of brief scenes--bridged by Ella Fitzgerald's recording of the title song---in which the three men try to survive. They quarrel with one another, often reacting less to the person alongside them than to stereotypical images that they carry in their heads; sometimes two of them join forces to attack the third; just as often, they play games together--verbal games, movie games, music games--and they share fantasies, as when the Irishman and the Englishman fly away home, taking turns spotting identifiable images on the imaginary landscape. There is something almost abstract in these survival turns as though Someone were a cousin of Waiting for Godot or an old-fashioned play dressed up in modernist clothing. It attempts to catch the horror of open-ended incarceration, isolation without the promise of escape, although the activities that the men devise to sustain themselves undermine the pain of their situation. Too much of what they say and do seems to come not from their need but from the playwright. Although the play presumably wants to make some kind of statement about the ability of men under stress to transcend their societally imposed narrowness, the essential seriousness of their situation does not rub off on the play itself. Finally, it seems to be less a dramatic presentation of an important theme than a vehicle for three performers. The most obvious explanation for the successful run of the play must lie in the performances of McCowen, Rea, and McDaniel. Certainly it was my appreciation of the actors not the play that I carried out of the theater last December and that has stayed with me. Three impressive performances is not a bad haul for a theatergoer.