The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Oct. 2, 1950

Daphne Laureola (by James Bridie; produced by Leland Hayward & Herman Shumlin in association with Laurence Olivier) is noteworthy only as a vehicle—and a transatlantic conveyance—for Dame Edith Evans. Probably the most distinguished of English actresses has come over from London in it, to waste her own time, though not entirely her audience’s, on Broadway. Playing an aged baronet’s rudderless, unquiet middle-aged wife—a woman in whom drink brings out the tarnish rather than the truth—Dame Edith hardly so much fleshes the role as clothes it with her own distinction. Her consistent sense of style and capacity for the grand style, her brilliant gifts of comedy, gesture and language throw a bright aura round a figure that Playwright Bridie leaves unfocused and indistinct.

The play itself is less bad than hopelessly talky and dull. Though the writing is better than the playwriting, it seldom seems alive; if Daphne Laureola was to be no more vital, it should perhaps have been trashier. There is nothing wrong with Bridie’s subject. His play rather resembles Willa Gather’s memorable novelette, A Lost Lady — in the lady herself, the perceptive old husband who dies (well played by Cecil Parker), the young romantic who idealizes her, the young vulgarian she sleeps with and marries. But far from capturing any of Willa Gather’s lingering glow, Bridie fails to give Daphne a saving gaudiness. For one thing, he spends half his time parading a lot of open-stock minor characters whom nothing would justify, and only a vivacity they quite lack would excuse.