...first rate...has pace and vigor.

July 10, 2002 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Dylan Thomas’s line, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” surfaces glancingly in the beginning of Ronald Harwood’s Quartet at the Berkshire Theatre Festival (berkshiretheatre.org).

However, in the American premier of the play, the actors, instead of raging, finally sing gloriously in the only way left to them. The play is set in the unlikely confines of an upscale retirement home for musicians who are past their prime.

All four in the current play are reluctantly present, all suffer some of the various regrettable indignities of aging: canes, looming surgeries, memory lapses, preoccupations with “days that were,” and knowledge of their present unimportance to few in the world outside the facility. But they cope and in the process there is, eventually, a generous caring, sharing, and triumph of sorts.

Stars Robert Vaughn (Reginald Paget ) and Kaye Ballard (Cecily Robson) head the cast which is abetted ably by Paul Hecht (Wilfred Bond) and Elizabeth Seal (Jean Horton). They share a musically decorated living room and eventually their secrets.

Vaughn is marvelous as the longest resident of the group. He has saved modestly for this retirement and feels he has his life under control. His days are self-structured and he is chief organizer of the Verdi celebration held each October. His main complaint seems to be against the breakfast maid who does not provide him with marmalade. However, his self-control is shattered by the unexpected arrival of the woman to whom he had been married, briefly, fifty years ago.

This diva, Horton, who has in the meantime shed several husbands and even children, is now alone and though briskly imperious and impeccably gowned, she has been reduced to a cane and the present facility where she is to await a hip replacement. Her arrival shatters her former husband for reasons that will not become apparent until late in the play; meanwhile his reactions, especially physical and facial ones, are examples of skillful characterization.

Equally dynamic as a character in a star turn is Ballard as Cecily; she is as winningly a formerly beloved diva as Seal is an unsympathetic one. She is warm, sexy, needy, and far along the road to forgetting who she is or where she is. Lucid at times and wanting to go into the garden to be near the male sweat of the young gardener, other times she is announcing her immediate return to India, from which she was banished as a child to attend school in London.

Cecily’s lapses are especially alarming to Wilfred Bond who humors her but also tries to protect her by not letting the establishment know how far gone she is and having to commit her elsewhere. His concern for her adds a dimension to his character of very male bravado and a great many of the comedy lines are his. He is earthy, almost vulgar, but touching in his compassion for Cecily and the fragile world in which much of the time she lives.

All four have enjoyed past fame. A new re-issue of their singing of Rigoletto has been released. Vaughn convinces them that they can perform it for the October Verdi commemoration and they do. How they do it is ingenious and ends the play on a joyous and hilarious note.

This is an enjoyable evening. The acting and directing are first rate. The play, especially the first act, has pace and vigor. The second act seemed a bit slow at the opening performance, whether in the writing which needs to include much material necessary to character development, or just in the staging which is somewhat cramped by the introduction of make-up tables. These tables are a real nuisance as background for the formal, final ending which is absolutely marvelous and which one only wishes could be longer.

This is a well-written, well-acted, well-directed, and joyously produced play.