THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH

(1968 Broadway Drama)






ONE OF THE TEN BEST EVER A review by Tom Prideaux of LIFE MAGAZINE


A short, bald British actor named Donald Pleasence is currently giving one of the ten best stage performances I have ever seen. His work on Broadway in The Man in the Glass Booth keeps company in my mind with such events as Sir Laurence Olivier in Oedipus Rex, Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie and Lee J. Cobb in Death of a Salesman. My esteem for Pleasence is based on 45 years of playgoing---and also, I must admit, on a childhood bias.

For me the apogee of good acting always used to be reached when an actor let his emotions spill over the footlights, especially if it involved a sudden switch in character---from pauper to prince, from beast to beauty's boyfriend, and, best of all, from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. At the age of 12, after seeing John Barrymore change from physician to fiend in the movies, I became a big Jekyll-and-Hyde man myself, usually in front of my parents in a regular Sunday night one-man show. My metamorphosis began when I ducked under a table, plastered my face with wet toilet paper that looked, I hoped, like hideously wrinkled skin and stuffed my mouth with homemade cardboard fangs. Then I rose up, howling and frothing, to reap their gasps of fright and admiration.

Ever since then, though such theatrics are long out of style, I have had a weakness for bravura acting. In The Man in the Glass Booth, Pleasence is playing right into my hands with an uninhibited portrayal of a man who constantly shifts moods and identities. At first he appears as a refugee from a Nazi concentration camp, living in Byzantine luxury as a New York real estate tycoon. The he is accused of really being a notorious Nazi war criminal and, without resisting, he is put on trial in Israel. There, eulogizing the Third Reich while locked in a bulletproof glass booth, Pleasence's histrionic fireworks almost melt the glass.

Pleasence gives the impression that he, like an old vaudeville performer I once saw, can whistle and hum two different tunes at once. He can make you taste sweet and sour, feel fire and ice---in unison. In his role as Arthur Goldman, Pleasence is alternately fastidious and hearty, as if he were sipping fine wine, then wolfing cheesecake. When he holds up his hands to have servants slide his rings onto his fingers, the gesture is in dead earnest, but is also faintly self-kidding and a parody of luxury. When he pokes a pistol at the neck of his personal physician, he manages to suggest both a mischievous joker and a menacing psychotic. When he orders from his tailor "two cashmeres, a vicuna" and, without losing a beat or shifting the level of his voice, adds, "and a coffin," you know the sybarite is also a hunted man.

His shifts of mood are like sleight-of-hand tricks, quicker than the eye. He can bring them off because he is an all-out, daring actor; when there's an emotional bridge to cross---whoosh---he's over it. The switch is believable to the audience because it is utterly believable to him. "He exists securely in the center of his work," says Harold Pinter, who directed the play.

The modern theater provides almost no chance for grand-scale acting. Emotions on the stage have grown wizened and weak, actors' voices, souped up with mikes, are losing their natural boom. In the trend toward improvisation any spontaneous mumble is rated higher than a well-rehearsed speech; most playwrights are asking no more of their actors than a pregnant harumph.

For some of his most deeply affecting moments in The Man in the Glass Booth, Pleasence seems to stop acting altogether and, as Pinter says, "converts his energies into absolute stillness and states a situation simply by being." But for most of the play, and thank heaven for it, he acts up a hurricane.

In his first fierce outburst in the play, Pleasence is talking calmly enough about his years as a prisoner in a Nazi death camp. Then without warning, as if an old wound had been ripped open, he howls, "Once I was passionate!" Most actors would muffle these four words and soft-pedal the shriek lest it sound too abrupt and unmotivated. But Pleasence confidently bellows it forth, because, as Pinter says, "it spring from the core of the man."

In the final Israeli trial scene, after he has transformed himself into the war criminal and is locked in his booth, Pleasence becomes a demented lover, vomiting out a paean to Hitler, lifting his palm in salute and goose-stepping in place until the booth shudders. It is unabashed bombast, saved from hokum by a cool and masterful talent. Like James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope, Pleasence can tear a passion to tatters. The two of them are restoring the theater to one of its original functions---as an arena for rugged emotions.


Review © 1968 LIFE. All Rights Reserved.





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Photos by Bert Andrews

Photos © 1968 Bert Andrews / GLASSHOUSE PRODUCTIONS.

Title and logo designed by Karen Rappaport




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