The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 28

THE GUARDIAN Wednesday November 9 1994 Murder most mindless Edward Albee, who returns to the English stage next week, explains why he needs a little Bach with his coffee in the mornings arD Elsey and him being "demi-gods." Rouse told his mother who told the principal of Modes. In the meantime, Petrolini had telephoned his parents and confessed. He felt "redeemed" by God by doing so and quaintly told the police, in a way that showed how detached from reality he had become, that he now hoped to "put something back into the community" by doing some work with the Red Cross in the summer. Elsey said nothing. Arrested, on the advice of his lawyer he remained silent.

Petrolini's rambling confession placed his erstwhile friend in the role of the evil genius, the manipulator who had persuaded him to kill. Both were charged with murder. Petrolini, having admitted the killing, submitted a plea of manslaughter through diminished responsibility. The trial drew full houses in both the press and public gallery where young girls gazed over the front row and the two sets of parents sat sadly at opposite corners, often holding hands with each other as the evidence became too painful to bear. Mr el-Sayed's brother sat alone in the body of the court, an expression.of bewilderment on his face.

The judge, Neil Denison, the Common Sergeant of London, who has a manner of old-world courtesy, presided. EACH of the two ran what is known as a "cut-throat" defence, a defence that depends on claiming that the co-defendant was the real culprit and is definitely lying. Petrolini gave evidence like a captured officer, shoulders back, answering "sir" to his counsel Peter Thornton OC. referring to his co- From page 3 from the heart. "I said to Richard, 'Jesus there's a lot of blood'." As Petrolini told it, Elsey held el-Sayed from behind as the killing took place.

As Elsey told it, he only entered the car after the deed was done and the blood on his hands came as he tried to stem the blood. They took el-Sayed's spectacles and keys and made their bloodstained journey by Underground to catch the late bus back to Oxford. They barely spoke on their journey back. In the back seat of the bus, Petrolini opened cards that he had been sent for his birthday, his 19th that fell that day, the last he would spend as a free man for many years. Elsey dozed beside him in the back seat.

Back in Oxford, they were to play a macabre game with the stolen spectacles with Petrolini wearing them and spitting fake blood, reassuring other students that this was "a private joke." While Elsey remained silent about what had happened, Petrolini was spinning out of control. He was hoping to establish a new friendship with Andrew Connor, a fellow-lodger and complete opposite of the short-haired, SAS-frcak that Elsey had become. Connor was a pony-tailed Nirvana fan, gentle and easygoing, who thought Petrolini was crazy to want to go into a job like the army where killing was required. In an abrupt about-turn, Petrolini now remodelled himself on his new friend, imagining he might make it as a musician, maybe be as famous as Kurt Cobain. The murder squad that started work the morning after a traffic warden found Mohamed el-Sayed's body still slumped in the car were puzzled.

It did not seem to be a robbery, a Middle East connection was ruled out early on. The murder seemed motiveless, clueless, the hardest kind to solve. Susan El-Sayed assured the police that her husband had no enemies: "everyone liked him." She knew about his gambling "I couldn't chain him to the flat" but there seemed no motive there. The inquiries were going nowhere when, the following month, they received a call from their colleagues in Oxford. A young man had made a statement to them claiming to have carried out a killing in Bayswater.

He did not even know the name of the man he claimed to have killed. Soon Petrolini was on his way back to London, to Paddington Green police station where he would blurt out his confessions. He had been unable to live with the murder. He and Elsey had barely spoken of it, had made a trip to see Wayne's World in London but Petrolini could not cope. Already he had blurted out details of the killing to Andy Connor and another fellow-student and lodger, Jonathon Rouse, spouting about his notions of defendant initially as "Richard" but more and more as "Mr Elsey," as he distanced himself from him.

Elsey answered more monosyla-bically, denying Petrolini's version, saying that he knew very well that Elsey was no SAS man and that he had no idea that a prank and the theft of a car would turn into a murder. The jury delivered its decision after five hours and 15 minutes. What remained uncertain in the air above Court Six was the real reason for the murder: was this a psychopath meeting a fantasist, with the fantasist Elsey acting as the accelerant on the slow-burning psychosis of Petrolini? Or was this ano-mie, with two privileged but deeply lonely and unhappy young men, their emotions cauterised by a decade of boarding school, facing no genuine challenges in their lives? Was Petrolini on the edge of schizophrenia as Dr Nigel Eastman suggested or not, as Dr Michael Brown felt? We are all amateur psychologists at the end of a murder trial. In the final act of Rope, one of the characters, Rupert Cadell, who is shocked by the pointlessness of the murder, rounds on the callow perpetrators and reminds them that they have taken the life of a man who four hours earlier had "lived and laughed and ran and found it good." Perhaps, as all the attention focuses on Masters Petrolini and Elsey, those words can act as an epitaph for Mohamed el-Sayed, who, indeed, once lived and laughed and ran and found it good. Written by Michael Billington Photograph by Henrietta Butler family drama and national allegory.

And A Delicate Balance mixes domestic realism with social parable. But running through all Albee's work I see a sustained critique of America: its dependence on illusions, its naked materialism, its loss of human contact. "I find all definitions limiting," says Albee. "Since we live in a post-existentialist age, anyone who writes interestingly almost by definition belongs to the Absurd. But plays also have to be useful, not merely decorative.

I like to go to the theatre and have the world changed for me and my values questioned. I like to have a mirror held up that says 'this is how you live your life and, if you don't like it, why don't you change Do we have to make a distinction between the social critic and the Absurdist?" But surely, I persist, he constantly analyses America's loss of community? "Yes. The loss of community with oneself. You can't have community if people are isolated within themselves. One of my concerns is that we do isolate ourselves and end up not participating in our own lives.

A Delicate Balance while it deals with the invasion of a family by a couple who have experienced a nameless terror is about the realisation that if we deny our social responsibilities long enough, we find we're no longer capable of doing anything when the time comes. What could be worse than coming to the end of your life and realising that you haven't fully participated? That's one of my worries about America: that we're not participating. Only 47 per cent of the American electorate actually votes; which means that whoever is elected is determined by about 25 per cent of the people. This isn't even participatory democracy. This is non-participatory semi-democracy." In Virigina Woolf in 1962 Albee wrote about a couple symbolically named George and Martha steeped in illusion and fantasy.

Looking at America today, has anything changed? "I was hopeful for a while that we were beginning to wake up. But now that I see the combination of the Republicans and an irresponsible press trying to destroy President Clinton I'm not so sure. I say there are no I I second acts in American I I life: there aren't many I I second acts in American plays either these days. But one exception to the rule is 66-year-old Edward Albee. After the initial sixties success of The Zoo Story, The American Dream, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? and A Delicate Balance, his career seemed to go into free-fall.

He continued to write, teach and direct but it is only with Three Tall Women, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York hit which opens at Wyndhams next Tuesday, that he has made one of the most acclaimed comebacks since Lazarus. Engaging in public chat with Albee recently at the Theatre Museum in London, I half expected to meet someone slightly chippy and defensive about the fickleness of public fortune. In fact, he turned out to be an amiable, well-preserved man as sleek and lean as one of the Irish wolfhounds that are his constant New York companions. How much, I wondered, was Al-bee's return to favour with Three Tall Women due to the fact that he had delved into his own past? He was an adopted child brought up by Reed Albee, who owned a chain of vaudeville theatres, and his domineering wife Frances, who was both a foot taller and 23 years younger than her husband. And in the play itself there is a 92-year-old autocrat, called simply who harps on constantly about the difference in height and age between herself and her late husband.

"An odd coincidence, that," says Albee with a chuckle. "It is true that I was adopted by this tall and powerful woman, that I was unhappy, ran away from home a number of times and finally left when I was 18. I wanted to write a play about Frances who was a complex and dominant character but I ended up inventing this woman while basing her entirely on a real person. I did the same thing in The American Dream where I had a character called Grandma based on my own bright, funny maternal grandmother but yet dramatically much more interesting. So much dramatic writing is about translating memories and experiences from the unconscious to the conscious mind; and in Three Tall Women I found I was inventing linos which, to my surprise, happened to coincide with the real facts." The difficulty with Albee lies in pinning him down.

The Zoo Story and The American Dream were quickly claimed as part of the Absurdist tradition. Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? is both O'Neill-type 5 off Admission to the London Effects and Animation Festival don't believe the extraordinary social adventure he planned for the United States as powerful as anything FDR ever proposed can succeed. Maybe we're so hooked on passivity that we don't want to continue being a peacefully evolving, revolutionary society any more." Albee insists, however, that he has many more questions than answers. "A playwright," he says, "is three things. He's a writer who, unlike a novelist, has to create totally believable dialogue.

He's a composer in that he has to orchestrate sound and silence so I think he should listen to music to tune his ear; listening to Bach in the morning clarifies the mind as coffee does. You can be a good playwright and have a tin ear Eugene O'Neill for instance but he'd have been even more important if he'd heard better. But a play- tMKmseffi a copy oi toaay uuaraian ai ff a Dally Pan (1 5) or at the Wembley Conference Cert the Festival registration oesK xne vnpv. 'The London Effects part of Computer Graphics cxpp Ql in YrV.r'7. r1 TT TV.