Word: bayliss
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...WORLD TREATING YOU? manages to be blisteringly funny in the modern British fashion as it peppers hypocrisy, respectability, caste and class snobbery and native Blimpcompoops. Two insuperable zanies, Peter Bayliss and Patricia Routledge, volley comic antics back and forth with the precision of a finals match at Wimbledon...
...three acts divide into surrealistic vaudeville episodes in the life of an anti-hero at ages 22, 32 and 42. In Act I, Lieut. Frank More (James Bolam) reports at a demobilization center sans troops or trousers. The colonel (Peter Bayliss) doesn't notice, since he is a total Blimpcompoop. He does notice that the peanuts are missing at the officers' bar, and he raises unprintable hell. World regularly mocks British dead-face understatement about things that count v. British redneck rage over trifles. Bayliss does a kind of tonsillectomy of his part. He wheezes, bleeps, snorts...
...this fact and More's marriage proposal across to the girl's brain-drained upper-class parents. Mother (Patricia Routledge) has her dress on backward so that it can be seen better when she is dancing, and her hair seems to be on backward too. When Father (Bayliss) grasps the bad news, he trots to the phone and demands a tuition refund, refusing to enter his daughter in the school's maternity wing...
...More's marriage is on the rocks. Having turned washing-machine salesman and failed, he has been taken to a refuge called Suicide Sanctuary. The sanctuary is run by a do-good nut (Bayliss again). As his wife and helper, Patricia Routledge hops around like a kangaroo whose pouch has just been rifled. Her name is Rover, and she has an imaginary dog named Maureen. "I hate the whole beastly business," says More. "The competition, the rat race." Replies Bayliss, in a tone typical of the play: "You mustn't hate the rat race. The human race...
...Bayliss and Routledge are insuperable zanies who volley words and antics with the pinging precision of a finals match at Wimbledon. Playwright Milner is an agile mind behind the madness...