The Theater: New Plays on Broadway, Mar. 14, 1960

The Good Soup (adapted from the French of Felicien Marceau by Garson Kanin) constitutes, even to the form it takes, the reminiscences of a coldly successful French cocotte. Ruth Gordon, as the middle-aged Marie-Paule, unfolds them to a Monte Carlo croupier, while Diane Cilento acts out Marie-Paule’s earlier self. Later, when Marie-Paule is no longer young, Actress Gordon wistfully dismisses Actress Cilento as her “vanished youth” and herself takes over the part. From prostitution in “half-hour hotels,” Marie-Paule had gone on to living grubbily with men, and then to being kept, and then to marriage and motherhood and expanding her husband’s business. When she tumbled at last to go into well-heeled banishment, it was, ironically, for just once blundering through compassion.

Told in neat, revue-skit-sized flashbacks, The Good Soup uses a good deal of stage material that is somewhat reminiscent itself. Its scenes are oftener familiar and hard-headed than lighthearted and original, so that in terms of lightly farcical entertainment, The Good Soup needs more sass and zest. But Soup, with the story it has to tell, need not only be as frothy as champagne, or as French as snails; it can also, and with rewards of its own, be as French as money. There is nothing girlishly rueful or gallantly raffish about Marie-Paule; though now and then touching, she is cynical and hard. “I don’t forgive,” she says, “even the ones who have done nothing to me.” She was not ruined or misled; she was never sentimentally tempted or morally torn; the one time love came to her it was overwhelmingly physical; regret was not for being calculating but for miscalculating, not for her tarnished youthful past, but for its passing. She has not mellowed or grown; she has only grown older.

Despite her jauntily presented and even half-parodied experiences, hers is a real portrait of a woman; and despite being often fashioned of cliches, hers—like that of Restoration-comedy worldlings—is an authentic attitude. But just as Restoration comedy can grow tiresome in constantly pursuing sex for pleasure. The Good Soup begins to flag in constantly pursuing it for pay. For the light touch to win out over the spotted truth, Marie-Paule’s career needs more amusing variety, or she herself needs a sense of humor, or Playwright Marceau a livelier wit. Yet, in addition to piquant staging and bright performances, notably by Actress Gordon and Mildred Natwick, The Good Soup has its own kind of interest of succeeding with the ice rather than the champagne, and shows character for preferring a measure of flatness to falsity.

There Was a Little Girl (adapted by Daniel Taradash from Christopher Davis’ novel) is the kind of play that particularly needs everything in it done right-and where almost nothing is. It tells of a well-brought-up 18-year-old girl, played by Henry Fonda’s promising 22 -year-old daughter Jane, who is assaulted by two hoodlums and raped by one of them. The dribbling scenes that follow and that involve the girl’s upset parents, her inquisitive kid sister, her caddish boy friend, the guilty hoodlum, an uncharitable community and the girl’s own hysterical qualms, do very little to justify what gave rise to them.

Beyond the adapter’s wobbly stagecraft and Joshua Logan’s unsure staging, the play — like some of its characters —capitalizes too much on its gossip value. The key to its level of taste is the between-the-scenes music that blares forth the mixed sentimentalism and sensationalism of a vastly-in-need-of-soap opera.