The Theater: Four of a Kind

Broadway, having its most old-fashioned Christmas in years, revived plays that were first produced in 1606, in 1883, in 1900 and in 1932:

King Lear (by William Shakespeare; produced by Robert L. Joseph & Alexander H. Cohen) is possibly the greatest single achievement in all literature—and the greatest stumbling block known to the stage. The play’s scope, declared the late great Critic A. C. Bradley, is too vast for any stage to encompass; while Charles Lamb contended that the title role cannot be acted, that Lear’s greatness is inward and “intellectual,” and that when put behind the footlights he becomes merely “an old man tottering about . . . with a walking stick.” There are other problems. The sharpest drama in the play—Lear’s division of his kingdom—comes at the very outset, making the play itself all aftermath. There is not only an elaborate subplot about Gloucester and his sons, but plot and subplot are two tales with but a single theme.

Broadway’s newest Lear is a good deal more painstaking than vibrant. But its newest Lear is not only far better than any other that Broadway has seen for a generation; it definitely indicates, even though it does not definitively prove, that the part can be acted. Tall, commanding Louis Calhern (Jacobowsky and the Colonel, The Magnificent Yankee) conveys what the faithful Kent saw in Lear’s countenance—authority.* Calhern also has a perfect sense of the vain, imperious whitebeard, the appalled father, the outraged king. And Calhern’s Lear is often touching as well as grand. Where he falls short is with the Lear who is tormented to madness, who is humanized and transformed by suffering. Where he falls down is in his misreading of a few crucial lines. All the same, his is a performance that fills the stage and canopies the play.

For the rest, the production merits respect for its determination to be serious rather than showy. Unfortunately, much of it seems commonplace, passionless, unbreathed upon. King Lear contains half a dozen roles stamped with Shakespeare’s maturest genius. But the production is a tangle of acting styles—an Edmund sinuous as an Oriental dancer, a Goneril straight out of melodrama; perhaps only Martin Gabel’s blunt, forthright Kent keeps its outline. Round the play’s great lonely poetic peaks roar the cold winds of human evil and malign fate, the bleak message that:

. . . Men must endure

Their going hence, even as their coming hither:

But this Lear has not philosophic weight enough, nor bright enough poetic wings.

Twentieth Century (by Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur, based on a play by Bruce Milholland) turned up, after nearly 20 years, as a pleasant Christmas surprise. Its revival also seemed a sort of desperate remedy. It is as near to rich, round entertainment as the American National Theater and Academy has come. It is also about as far from what ANTA should be doing as so high-purposed an organization could go. Twentieth Century is a brazenly commercial farce, made into a sure thing with Jose Ferrer’s sturdy reputation and Gloria Swanson’s sudden new fame.

The play itself, not unfittingly, is an entertaining spoof of what people in show business will do to get ahead. During the run of the 20th Century Limited from Chicago to New York, a megalomaniac producer with his eye on the gallery and his back to the wall plots to squeeze a contract out of a posturing box-office star who could prove his salvation. While illicit lovers, escaped lunatics and stranded Passion players create bedlam, and soft soap is interspersed with billingsgate, the actress and the producer outham, in an effort to outwit, each other.

It is the broadest possible burlesque, the wildest possible farce, but it is happily and high-spiritedly all of a piece. The production is broad, too, rather than brilliant. Miss Swanson, inexpert at straight acting, can be very funny when she strikes attitudes and deliberately overacts. But only Ferrer, an old hand at extravaganza, gets brilliance into the broadness.

Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (by George Bernard Shaw; produced by the New York City Theater Company) got the City Center’s season off to a happy start. It also got itself off the Broadway shelf for the first time in 35 years. Brassbound was never a dazzling Shaw, but the years have made it no dustier. It offers a pleasant early medley of some standard Shavian ideas; it jabs sharply at society —but playfully, as at a dartboard.

Brassbound centers round charming, guileful, benevolent Lady Cicely Wayne-flete (Edna Best), who always wins out by seeming to give in. who licks every problem by assuming that there is none. Touring in Morocco with her brother-in-law, a correct English judge (Clay Clement), she insists on making a dangerous expedition into the hills. When she encounters peril she purrs at it, and soon has the menacing native chiefs eating out of her hand. When she finds that the guide, Captain Brassbound (John Archer), is the wronged and revengeful nephew of the judge, she converts him to reason.

After a sluggish first act, Brassbound settles down to being steadily bright, if never particularly brilliant. Shaw characteristically used melodrama both to enliven his thin-blooded story and to satirize his blood-thirsty hero; he just as characteristically played brigands who take the law into their own hands against judges who adapt it to their own ends. But the real core of the play is Lady Cicely, as the great merit of the production is Edna Best. With deftness and wit, she takes a part created 50 years ago expressly for Ellen Terry and very nearly makes it her own.

An Enemy of the People (adapted from the Norwegian of Henrik Ibsen by Arthur Miller; produced by Lars Norden-son) is not among the most resounding of the hammer blows that Ibsen once struck, but it is perhaps the most fiercely personal. The play’s hero, Dr. Thomas Stock-mann, discovers that the waters of a prosperous Norwegian spa are dangerously polluted. When he seeks to announce the fact, he comes smack up against the town’s vested interests. Public opinion is turned so violently against him that he is denounced and boycotted as “an enemy of the people.”

Ibsen, whose own uncompromising plays had been harshly excoriated,, wrote much of his own emotion into Dr. Stock-mann. In Stockmann’s plight he saw vindicated his distrust of majorities, his feeling that the sheep can be as dangerous as the wolves. “The minority,” he wrote to Critic Georg Brandes while working on An Enemy, “is always right.” Like Stock-mann, Ibsen would not be silenced; like Stockmann, he accepted almost exultantly the loneliness of leadership.

Certainly Playwright Ibsen stood alone in An Enemy of the People, lashing out in all directions at every class and kind: at the moneybags for being corrupt, at the moderates for being corruptible, at the liberals for being fainthearted, at the mob for being brute-minded. As protest, An Enemy is frequently valid, though as playwriting it is too pat and contrived: the play is less interesting for its social protest than for its individualist scorn.

Arthur (Death of a Salesman) Miller’s Enemy is a shortened, sharpened, slanged-up version, with some new blood replacing the old, flaccid, translator’s English. And Fredric March plays Stockmann with helpful vigor. But Miller has given the play a more agitated but less striking face. His version is not so much bitter satire as topical melodrama (with some of the new blood smeared on the characters’ foreheads). It is not so much an affirmation of minority rightness as a plea for minority rights; it suggests a man persecuted less for telling the unpalatable truth than for having unpopular opinions. It is livelier theater, but it seems even more contrived as a play, and is sometimes very dubious Ibsen.

* For other news of Actor Calhern, see CINEMA.