Theater: Tallulah in Maplewood

Like a durable old dowager, creaky but impressive, the Second Mrs. Tanqueray has swept in & out of theatres ever since 1893. First played by the late great Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the deplorably accessible heroine of this Pinero drama has been variously enacted by Eleanora Duse, Olga Nethersole, Gladys Cooper, Ethel Barrymore. Last week, in Maplewood, N. J., looking buxom as a milkmaid and in fine vocal trim, Tallulah Bankhead demonstrated that there’s life in Pinero’s old girl yet.

When the Second Mrs. Tanqueray was originally presented, it shocked Victorian audiences out of their buttoned boots. The play pointed up the fact that a lady can’t roll in the hay and then expect to live in the manor. Although Sir Arthur Wing Pinero laced his drama with many a tight homily and saw to it that his Paula’s past caught up with her in the end, the uniform reaction of audiences was one of shocked disapproval. Produced during the same year in London and New York, the Second Mrs. Tanqueray inspired much pulpitation, was condemned by critics as unfit for mother, brother, sister or wife. Not for a couple of years was it generally admitted that the Second Mrs. Tanqueray had made Pinero England’s top-flight problem playwright.

Telescoped from four into three acts by Producer Cheryl Crawford, directed fairly briskly by Romney Brent, Maplewood’s Second Mrs. Tanqueray afforded Tallulah Bankhead plenty of opportunities to show her deft dramatic stuff. As she whirled through her paces, the inevitable squeaks of the revival’s old joints were hardly audible.