Superscamp

By T.E.K.

SCAPINO

byMOLIERE

French farce is customarily associated with the bedroom. There are no bedrooms in Scapino, but the evening is filled with sheer comic bedlam anyway. The Young Vic presented this Moliere farce earlier in the season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It has returned in a hands-across-the-sea gesture to aid the financially beleaguered Circle in the Square Joseph E. Levine Theater. Scapino should prove to be just the right box office tonic.

Moliere's title was Les Fourberies de Scapin (roughly, Scapin's Knaveries), and the playwright borrowed the basic outlines of the story from a famous Roman play, Terence's Phormio. The Young Vic has switched the locale to Naples, and performs the work in the bouncy tradition of British vaudeville.

In the title role, Jim Dale is the traditional wily scamp of a servant. He is sassy, resourceful and clever, the sort of endearing rogue who puts his fat, pompous and moneyed betters in their places. At the behest of two lovelorn sons with two miserly fathers, Scapino engineers an endless repertory of deceptions with a blazing battery of slapstick. Whether mimicking the two dunderheaded old fossils, or mulcting them, or pretend-hiding them in sacks and flailing the daylights out of them with a cloth truncheon shaped like an oversize bologna, there is no stopping Scapino. Eventually caught out by the two old fogies, the superscamp gains their pardon, and hoodwinks the pair again, by pretending to breathe his last. At the end of the mazelike plot, everyone is wreathed in smiles, especially the audience.

The people in the Young Vic Company are as nimble as acrobats and perform with a swinging verve and a broad comic style. The nimblest of all is Dale, a versatile actor, British TV comic and composer (Georgy Girl). In his facial contortions and his airborne, aisle-hopping feats, he is a direct descendant of the great physical clowns--unforgettables like Bobby Clark, Bert Lahr, Harold Lloyd, W.C. Fields and Buster Keaton. It does not require much prophetic vision to foresee that Jim Dale will share the same renown some day. . T.E-K.

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