The Salon as Slaughterhouse

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

WHEN JANE ALEXANDER WAS starring in Harold Pinter's Old Times off-Broadway a decade ago, an unlikely Pinter fan -- Jackie Gleason -- went backstage to ask what the play meant. "I don't know," Alexander replied. "I'm not sure even Mr. Pinter does." Gleason nodded to express his own bafflement, then added, "Hell of an evening though."

That mix of confusion and spellbinding tension is Pinter's trademark: it is never quite clear what is happening, but whatever it is, it is urgently important. The menacing mysticism reaches a peak in No Man's Land, a series of drawing-room encounters soured by a barroom aura of impending rough-and- tumble. Like most great playwrights, Pinter keeps writing the same work. No Man's Land is The Homecoming with fancier furniture, Old Times with more recherche recollections, The Birthday Party with a gentler goon squad. It is also, from a playwright generous to actors, the showiest acting duel in his repertoire.

The play made its debut on Broadway in 1976 with John Gielgud as a scruffy but glib old poet and Ralph Richardson as the addled "man of letters" who has invited him home. Last year it resurfaced in London with Pinter in the Richardson part and veteran comic actor Paul Eddington (TV's Yes, Minister) succeeding Gielgud. Last week it returned to Broadway with Jason Robards as the bonhomous householder and Christopher Plummer as his versifying guest.

The new production is not the most nuanced of the three but is surely the funniest -- and the most ambisexual. British director David Jones, a longtime collaborator with Pinter, does not mess with the text, but he does point up homosexual undertones, overtones and just plain tones in the relationships among the two old men and two younger ones who purport to be servants but act like thugs. As usual with Pinter, sexual attraction manifests itself in smidgens of affection and buckets of scorn, and the goal of Eros is the adolescent urge to have something to brag about. The sexual linkages, from passion to cuckoldry, get even more complicated in the second act, when the two old men shift from scrutinizing each other as strangers to confronting each other as acquaintances since school days.

Robards' braying and bluster are adroit but familiar. Plummer's fussiness and dither are a natural outgrowth of the feline, even feminine, nature of many of his heroes (and most of his villains). But his raddled face, Einstein coiffure and teetery walk are new and, surprisingly from this most mannered of actors, feel free of mannerism. The verbal cut and thrust between them is the finest now on Broadway -- elegantly bloodless and as ferocious as a slaughterhouse.