Little need be said about Honour, which even with that added u remains infra dig and non-U. A pallidly contrived exercise in marital-infidelity comedy-drama, the Australian Joanna Murray-Smith’s opuscule proves only that David Mamet dialogue is now being imitated even at the antipodes. Wasted are the considerable talents of Robert Foxworth, Laura Linney, and an auspicious newcomer, Enid Graham; and the even greater one of Jane Alexander, whose appeal not even years as a culture commissar in uncultured Washington have managed to dim.

Sad for Miss Alexander to choose Honour as her comeback vehicle. But few straight plays open on Broadway these days, and both actors and audiences are at the mercy of tasteless producers. Honour is written by someone capable of such solecisms as “knowing who each other used to be,” a poor augury.

But dear Miss Murray-Smith wrote this in New York City while studying at Columbia University, presumably not English grammar. As an earnest of her cosmopolitanism we get such lines as “Every life has its tragedies, like the day Tina Brown took over The New Yorker.” I wonder how that played in Sydney.

Related:

• Archive: “Theater Reviews”
• Articles by John Simon
• Table of Contents: May 11, 1998 issue of New York | Subscribe!