Paying Guest

Though he looks like a British version of Mr. Peepers, the likeness ends there. Theater Critic Bernard Levin is the enfant terrible of London's West End. Long the Manchester Guardian's television reviewer, he grew "weary of spitting into the wind" in 1958 and quit. As an irascible panelist for the BBC's satiric That Was the Week That Was show, he once greeted a group of farmers with the words, "Good evening, peasants." But it is in his theater reviews for Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express and more recently for the Daily Mail that his stiletto prose has dug deepest. Damned by producers as a "hired play assassin," he panned a musical by Playwright Wolf Mankowitz so savagely that Mankowitz led six girls into his office with an undersized coffin, saying: "This is the moment we have been waiting for--to send a midget coffin to a midget critic."

To Levin, the theater is "a beleaguered city, invested not by hostile troops but by the impersonal, creeping jungle. I ask of any new production: Is it helping to push back the jungle or is it, by carelessness or treachery, letting another patch of strangling green encroach upon the walls?" Last year, even before a new mystery called Signpost to Murder had a chance to make its debut. Levin made up his mind that it would be one more case of jungle rot. "Don't tell me, let me guess," Levin wrote sarcastically in the Express, speculating in advance on just how bad the play was going to be. Infuriated. Producer Emile Littler withdrew his first-night invitation, but Levin cadged a ticket from a friend and got in anyhow. "Well," he wrote later, "I did see it--and it's absurd." Littler answered the gate-crashing critique with a law suit accusing Levin of trespassing.

Last week, when the case finally came to trial, Levin and the Beaverbrook newspapers capitulated with astonishing alacrity. They conceded that on first nights theater producers are entitled to invite or exclude anyone. The price for Levin's first-night ticket: $22,400 in damages and legal costs. "A great day for the living theater," exulted Littler. As for Signpost. despite mixed reviews it ran for a year in London, is now packing the house in Britain's provinces, has been picked up by M-G-M for $70,000 and will move to Broadway some time this year.

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