A Night Out
Armchair Theatre

The company footballer (insurance) who lives with his mum and doesn’t hardly get out much, Albert, goes to an office party at Mr. King’s where there is scandal and afterward meets the girl no better than she should be yet having ideas above her station, home to mum who will not keep.

Tom Bell, Madge Ryan, Vivien Merchant, David Baron, Philip Locke, Arthur Lowe et al., intensively directed on the best live television lines, intricate, furioso, intimate.

In Camera
The Wednesday Play

Sartre’s joke about the pacifist, the dyke and the kept woman.

Huis clos, customarily known as No Exit, in English (trans. Stuart Gilbert).

A definitive position, hellishly defined by a certain lack of definition, somehow.

And yet, given the long look of a certain sort of eternity, it adds up to a very precise nightmare, in a way.

That’s the nagging thing about it. Saville takes advantage of its status as a modern play extraordinaire to set it in a contemporary art museum with the latest in “modren art” and flat benches, one per each.

Harold Pinter (Old Times), Jane Arden, Katherine Woodville.

Oedipus the King

The purpose of the intricate filming in an ancient Greek amphitheater and environs is to instruct the spectator in the art by translating its effect on an audience in antiquity. There is the spectacle or drama of representation, a genuine Greek vision of players on the stage and before the rings of seats, the action moves up into the empty crowd, it’s heard in the fields, a rigorous action that penetrates everywhere, even to the herdsmen on the hills, and then it is done, Oedipus passes blind into the countryside.

Canby found it a bore, Variety “superficial”, Time Out Film Guide “screamingly tedious”.

The Long Distance Piano Player
Play for Today

Alan Sharp’s recital of a marathon for fame to secure a U.S. tour.

The wife objects, the manager flogs, interest is sparse at best, the “marathon man” bangs away at the keys more and more blurrily.

The image is of a fox once seen in a wood.