BROADWAY: English Invasion

Two English girls, each bright, dark-eyed and proper, have come to Broadwayto play women of flat-out sin. Both actresses meet the challenge with so much talent, and promise to be around New York for so long, that they may very nearly turn Manhattan’s West Side into London’s West End.

The Dream Tart. “We drama critics were pretty shameless in confessing that we’re in love,” wrote Richard Watts, Jr. in the New York Post about Elizabeth Seal, star of Broadway’s Irma La Douce. “She convinces you that there is nothing left for you in life but to wrap her up and take her home, southern-fried,” added the Herald Tribune’s Walter Kerr. Transcending the theater’s most ancient cliche, Irma is a whore with a heart for gold (TIME, Oct. 10). The eldest daughter of an English shipping broker would hardly seem to be the right sort for the part, but Actress Seal is piquant, pungent, brisk and racy-eyed. At 26, she is one of England’s outstanding musical stars, led the London productions of The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees, played Irma for two years in London.

Elizabeth Anne Seal was born in Genoa, where her father was working. Her dancing career started in London during World War II, when civil-defense units took over her neighborhood school gymnasium; young Elizabeth and her classmates took ballet lessons to get proper exercise. Before she was ten she had won a scholar ship to the Royal Academy of the Dance.

She also went to Harvington, a reserved Middlesex school for reserved Middlesex girls, but when a broken ankle forced her to give up classical ballet at 16, she quit school and got the first of a series of chorus-line jobs, working part-time as a charwoman. At about the time that Composer-Lyricist Richard Adler pulled her out of the chorus and into stardom in The Pajama Game, a blond-bearded writer with the familiar name of Peter Townsend (no kin) got her to the church on time. Before the wedding, she did playful cancans in the vestry and, because it was a cold, snowy day, she remembers: “I put on my father’s Long Johns under my wedding dress.”

In Irma, Performer Seal bursts from song to dance in bright voice and black stockings, suggesting an unclaimed child with large, soft eyes and an untidy drift of hair, and at the same time suggesting the full-lipped, loose-bloused, tight-skirted, cynical insouciance of a man’s dream tart. How could she understand the part so well? “I have a rather close friend who’s a tart,” says Elizabeth Seal in even Mayfair tones. “Of course, one has to have experience.”

The Once-Gilded Butterfly. A slight, shy English girl with dark, close-cropped hair and round, ragdoll eyes, Joan Plowright (rhymes with how right) also believes that one has to have experience —in her case, for the role of the unfortunate young Manchester girl in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (see THEATER). “I know Manchester,” she says. “I lived there and had very little money and lived in rooms quite like this one. I know this sort of people so well.”

Before she arrived to do the play, American audiences were vaguely familiar with Joan Plowright as the apparent choice to be the next wife of Sir Laurence Olivier. Now they know her as an actress worthy of the part. Daughter of a Lincolnshire newspaper editor, she got her impulse toward the stage from her mother, who as a girl ran away three times to become an actress but “was fetched back three times because it wasn’t considered respectable.” Joan had her first acting experience with her mother’s amateur theatrical group.

At 18 she won a scholarship to the school at the Old Vic, followed that with four kick-about years in various rep companies. “It was rehearse all morning,” she remembers, “ride the bus in the afternoon, help put up the sets, iron your own costume, slip out for a meal, give a performance, and ride the bus home at 2 a.m. That was our whole life, and it’s all I wanted. I needed it. Behind five wigs and four noses, as in the Old Vic parts, it was fine. But to show myself as I am—I simply wasn’t equipped.”

Winning her first big role in 1955 as a cabin boy in Orson Welles’s production of Moby Dick, she later became an original member of the English Stage Company, which gave her a range of experience from Wycherley to Ionesco, from youth to old age: she once played a 17-year-old and a 94-year-old in the same performance (“It’s easier to play a 94-year-old than a so-year-old when you’re 25”). It was her work in the company that brought her to the attention of Olivier-she was his daughter in The Entertainer, his warmhearted, empty-headed girl last season in Rhinoceros. “Actresses used to be sort of gilded butterflies,” says Joan Plowright, “but now we’ve become a part of life in England.”