MEN BEHAVING BADLY.('She Stoops to Conquer' and 'The Talking Cure')(Theater Review)

In print, Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) was some kind of literary star; in life, he was some kind of clown. His erudition won him the company of the era's great men--Dr. Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Edmund Burke among them. But the ladies of London toasted his Irish ugliness, and a stutter robbed him of authority. He was both fumbling and funny. (Upon the death of his mother, with whom he had a fractious relationship, he dressed in half-mourning. "Oh, it was a distant relative," he explained.) "The misfortune of Goldsmith in conversation is this: he goes on without knowing how he is to get off," quipped Dr. Johnson, to whom Goldsmith dedicated his 1773 comic masterpiece "She Stoops to Conquer." By the time the play was written, English theatre had--in a reaction against the bawdry and high jinks of the Restoration--hit the Puritanical skids: the British bourgeoisie was on the rise, and so was its push for art to reflect Christian virtues. Shakespearean tragedies were furnished with happy endings; aggression in comedies was replaced with sentiment. Goldsmith, however, understood that cruelty is essential to comedy--without a killing, no feast--and "She Stoops to Conquer" proved to be just the antidote to the infection of sanctimony it attacked. "I know of no comedy for many years that has . . . answered so much the great end of comedy--making an audience merry," Dr. Johnson said.

The comedy (revived at London's Royal National Theatre, under the vigorous direction of Max Stafford-Clark) is built around a malicious joke. Charles Marlow (Christopher Staines), an eligible scholar and man of mode, gets lost one night on his way to stay with a family friend, a genial burgher named Hardcastle (Ian Redford). Marlow is assisting his sidekick, Hastings (Stephen Beresford), in a plan to elope with an orphaned heiress, a member of the household--which also includes Hardcastle's spoiled practical-joking stepson, Tony Lumpkin (Owen Sharpe), and his spirited daughter, Kate (Monica Dolan). As bad luck would have it, the men meet up with Lumpkin at a tavern and he directs them to Hardcastle's manor but tells them that it's an inn. "This is Liberty Hall, gentlemen," Hardcastle says, welcoming them into his home--a phrase that turns out to be truer than he knows. Hastings is soon wise to the prank, but he fails to disabuse Marlow, who goes on thinking of Hardcastle as an innkeeper. Like Goldsmith, Marlow is chronically shy--virtually paralyzed--among ladies of polite society. In his first brief, stammering encounter with Kate, he never looks at her face. When he does catch sight of her later, wearing a plain dress, he assumes that she's a barmaid.

The trope of mistaken identity allows Goldsmith to defy decorum and to explore, through comedy, the psychology of modesty. Manners insist on the appearance of sexual restraint, but Marlow's fear of exposing his desire vanishes among the lower orders, where virtue isn't an issue. When he talks to Kate as a "barmaid," he is suddenly bold. "I vow, child, you are vastly handsome," he says. "Suppose I should call for a taste, just by way of a trial, of the nectar of your lips?" Kate, who knows what's going on, decides to play along, because, as she says, "I shall be seen, and that is no small advantage to a girl who brings her face to market." In a delightful inversion of romantic idealism, she gets her man by pretending to be a malaprop-prone prole, and Goldsmith, through his genial cast of flawed but warmhearted characters, exposes the thin line between respectability and rapacity.

Goldsmith subtitled his comedy "The Mistakes of a Night." Mistakes of a far more traumatic kind are the subject of Christopher Hampton's "The Talking Cure" (directed by Howard Davies, also at the Royal National), which tells the fascinating story of Carl Jung's affair with his first analytic patient, Sabina Spielrein, a well-educated Russian eighteen-year-old whom he began treating in 1904. Spielrein went on to study with Freud, before becoming a gifted psychoanalyst herself. In the play, as she shuttles between saviors, Hampton also depicts the decline of Jung's volatile six-year relationship with Freud and his transformation from the "heir apparent of psychoanalysis" to alienated apostate.