Down an Alley Filled with Cats

by Warwick Moss; directed by Peter Askin; stage manager, Winifred Powers; set designer, Roy Hine; light designer, Nancy Collings. Presented by the Quaigh Theater, Will Lieberson, artistic director. Produced by Melanie Webber, by special arrangement with Down an Alley Company. At 103 West 43d Street.

Timmothy Timmony...Theo Barnes
Simon Mathews...Stewart Finlay-McLennan.

1/8/87 Article in New York Times C21 Theater: 'Down an Alley Filled With Cats' Opens

By F. J. R. BRUCKNER

Warwick Moss, an Australian playwright, is said to have changed the ending of "Down an Alley Filled With Cats" for each new production it has had since it won the award for best new play at the Canberra Festival in 1983. The ending of the current production at the Quaigh Theater is fitting and funny. But the ending of this farcical mystery might be changed every night, since you are never sure what has ended, anyway. That is Mr. Moss's point. He makes the audience play detective in a thriller in which no person or object remains what it had seemed to be from one minute to the next. The answer to every riddle is another, and by the time the play reaches its illuminated, if not illuminating, conclusion the audience has learned to enjoy its own gullibility almost as much as that of the two characters who lead it down the alley of the title, a mental maze of crazily misleading paw prints.

The plot owes something to "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Lavender Hill Mob" but more to old British comic formulas and Monty Python. 'Two con men are trying to find clues to a hidden treasure. When the play begins, one has been killed (maybe), and the other falls into the clutches of a bookseller who has figured out their game and its clues but who hasn't the strength - nor, as it turns out, the wit - to get the treasure for himself. Timmothy the bookseller (Theo Barns) and Simon the dumb thug (Stewart Finlay-McLennan) spend a night locked in the bookseller's grubby apartment trying to trick each other out of the treasure, and ancient Chinese vase they talk about as reverently as Arthurian knights dreaming of Holy Grail. They have other preoccupations one expects in a mystery - covering up a murder that many or many not have happened, disposing of a body that may have got up and walked away on it own and trying to recognize their grail one they think they've found it. They act out all the traditional rituals of threats, humiliations betrayals and assaults with deadly weapons only to find themselves confounded at last by their own innocence.

This old stuff and so fragile that it is a tribute to Mr. Moss's skill as a writer and Peter Askin's as a director that the play isn't a bore. There are thin spots, especially during a long drunken scene, and some distraction moments in which the playwright tries to develop the characters of the crook and the book dealer when in fact too much sympathy with them would destroy the humor of their situation. But on the whole this is a tight, bright play that transforms familiar devices and corny lines into amusing theater. Mr. Barnes's Timmonthy is a man thrown off balance constantly by his delight in discovering how wily he can be and his nagging since that he really isn't up to being a lifelong fox. And Mr. Finlay-McLennan, as a crook with two prison terms behind him who is afraid of mice, cats, homosexuals, dead bodies (even dead chickens) and respectable women, is a wonderfully foolish felon. He speaks lines that would embarrass the most cynical vaudevillian with the just the right touch of indignant conviction to make them sound natural. His outrage when he discovers Timmonthy has been deceiving him about a clue to the treasure is clever comedy; you are not sure whether he's annoyed at finding that even learned people can be liars or at the discovery of his won stupidity. The whole performance is like that - self-discovery that tickles while it hurts; it is a good celebration of out common rascality.