Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Apr. 24, 1933

For Services Rendered (by William Somerset Maugham; Sam H. Harris, producer). A novel in shortcuts, this Maugham play deals with an English family and its friends. The War has been over 15 years, but its wounds still fester. Father Ardsley is a solicitor, a portly British character of the type that sings carols on Christmas cards. He has a wife, who he does not know is about to die of an incurable disease, and three daughters. Lois (Jane Wyatt) is pretty, selfish and extremely attractive to a rich older man. Ethel is bitterly disappointed in an earthy, loutish farmer whom she married in the days when every officer was by general consent a gentleman.

It is Ethel’s husband Howard who introduces the D. H. Lawrence note into the proceedings. Any and all problems confronting this burly man are promptly solved by the sex equation. Thus it is that he perceives, before anyone else, that while Sister Lois is about to get a man, Sister Eva (Fay Bainter) desperately needs one. Since her sweetheart was killed in Flanders, pinch-faced Eva has been told off to nurse her War-blinded brother and end her days in suppressed spinsterhood. Eva might have escaped her fate had not her last chance, an ex-naval officer, shot himself when his garage business failed.

“I have no doubt that he was a gallant officer,” observes her father, “but he was no businessman. He was simply no businessman.”

“They might put that on his tombstone,” remarks the blind brother.

Eva goes quietly mad. With his family crumbling about him, thick-headed Father Ardsley cheerfully congratulates one & all upon their general good fortune, believes that conditions will improve, all will be well. Very softly, Eva, a crazy gleam in her eyes, begins singing “God Save The King.” Her younger sister gives her one frightened glance, rushes off to join her married suitor, thus completing the cycle of destruction.

Few spectators before seeing For Services Rendered realized that Mr. Maugham, better known for drawing-room drama, was still brooding about the War. Few will consider his present play, an incompleted gallery of promising portraits, a dramatic milestone. But no one will soon forget Fay Bainter’s tense impersonation in the one three-dimensional role the piece affords.

The 3-Penny Opera (words & music by Bert Brecht & Kurt Weill; John Krimsky $ Gifford Cochran, producers). The pedigree of this tatterdemalion opera bouffe is long and diffuse. From the 200-year-old John Gay libretto, Messrs Brecht & Weill made a modern German adaptation. It became a cinema and an operetta called Die Dreigroschenoper. These played about the European capitals with marked success. Then Messrs Krimsky & Cochran anglicized the operetta, first naming their production The Beggar’s Opera, then The Three-Pence Opera, then The 3-Penny Opera.

There is still a good deal of Gay if not gayety left in the piece. There are thieves, beggars, constables and trollops willing to sing and speak with irony of their woes. But the time has been changed from Queen Anne’s day to Queen Victoria’s. And the spirit of cutpurse abandon has been superseded by an atmosphere which is often sullen, often merely dirtily proletarian, often obscure.

Rex Weber, onetime burlesque ventriloquist who introduced “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” in this season’s Americana, finds himself thoroughly at home among paupers of an earlier period. He is Jonathan Peachum, director general of London’s beggars, who finally persuades Sheriff Brown to hang his good friend Captain Macheath because the erring captain has won the heart of Jonathan’s daughter Polly. Robert Chisholm (Sweet Adeline) plays Macheath with grace, not in the costume of an 18th Century highwayman but with the spats and swordcane of a Victorian confidence man. Polly is Steffi Duna, who in Hungary was called “Steffi, the Wonder Child.” Pert Miss Duna, whose elfin face looks not unlike Sylvia Sidney’s, played in Noel Coward’s Words & Music in London earlier this season, is now making her U. S. bow.

To Caspar Neher goes credit for some unique scenery, including two invaluable magic lantern screens which announce numbers and situations, and a papier-máché horse which slides out of a pipe organ just in time to save Captain Macheath’s life. Composer Weill’s music is dissonantly insinuating. A sample of Librettist Brecht’s strange but robust work:

We lived as though ’twas in a poem

In our bordel,

Where we made house and home.