WHISPER INTO MY GOOD EAR

by Hanley, William

According to Howard Taubman, the play “is a study of two old pensioners who find surcease from their fleabag of a hotel and their loneliness in meeting near the edge of a park lake. This time they have met to carry out an agreement to commit suicide together. Charlie is almost blind and full of truculence, the kind of man who resents the tree behind his back because it has been around 100 years and will outlast him. Max is gentle, introverted and, it develops, homosexual. Nothing happens between them, but the two talk—amiably, impatiently, bitterly—and reveal themselves and the sources of their despair.” In the end the suicide pact is abandoned, at least for the present, for both men become aware that it is often enough just to be alive and to search each day for the values that even the most wretched can perceive.