The English theater has developed a brand of Absurdism of its own, more socially conscious, more concerned with quaint but real types, more prosaic than its French counterpart. In the plays of N. F. Simpson, Henry Livings, Ann Jellicoe and a few others, the Absurd has been domesticated: it has been swathed in flannels and tweeds, a pipe has been stuck in its mouth, and it has even developed a taste for tea. Certainly the amount of tea consumed in Ann Jellicoe's The Knack compares favorably with the quantity ingested in a play by James Bridie, J. B. Priestley or whoever the current West End favorite may be. But Miss Jellicoe strains her tea through some curiously barren, bizarrely monochromatic, almost basic-English dialogue, but an always slightly off-base basic.

She gives us three young men in a lodging house: one a sort of Soho satyr who measures out his life with petty seductions; the other a foolishly likable ninny, starved for women; the third an homme moyen sensuel, full of outrageous fancies but quite sensible underneath. The teddy-boy picks a little provincial guinea pig for the teddy bear to practice on under his sinister guidance. The nice chap tries to humanize the experiment. The guinea pig revolts. There are all kinds of crosscurrents, cross purposes, double crosses, and minor mayhem. Amiable decency seems, in the end, to assert itself.

Miss Jellicoe has said in an interview that "people should forget their intellect for a while and lead fuller and richer sensory and emotional lives," and The Knack certainly capitalizes on the most visceral aspects of conversation, so to speak, garnished by charmingly feminine flights of comic fancy. Her play is a kind of good-natured fat lady, naked but wearing a funny hat—a daintily comic cloche over a Gaston Lachaise body. Typically, the girl's dialogue for half a page or more consists of the word "Rape!" Simple but not ordinary: she is screaming about a rape that hasn't been committed, though she wishes it had; and calling for help which, however, she doesn't want to come. It is the victim raping the rapists, who are really rapists in spite of themselves. It is a topsy-turvy world, seen upside-down through an old-fashioned camera, but all the time we know that we will get from it a picture that is comfortingly right-side-up. I found The Knack amusing and endearing…. (pp. 55-6)