Theatre: Brief Candles

Two famed plays were revived in Manhattan on successive nights last week, soon flickered out. Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (produced by Robert Henderson & Estelle Winwood) lasted four performances, Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (produced by Henry Forbes) lasted three. With the shining exception of the Mercury Theatre’s Julius Caesar (TIME, Nov. 22), Shakespeare has had hard sledding on Broadway this season. As You Like It, Antony and Cleopatra, The Merry Wives of Windsor were flops, Coriolanus a middling success in its briefly scheduled Federal Theatre run. The Merry Wives, which was written to order in a fortnight because Queen Elizabeth wanted to see Falstaff in love, is creaking farce at best. Last week’s production, out-Elizabethaning any college outdoor revels on record, was all hideous coyness, bumpkin antics, noddy-noddy-nubkins. A charging, bellowing Falstaff (Louis Lytton) carried on like a bull in ye olde antique shoppe, with the rest of the cast trying, all giggledy-piggledy, to be lewd, quaint, rollicking by turns.

The Wild Duck, coming after the season’s brilliant revival of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (TIME, Jan. 10), was just as disastrous as The Merry Wives in exactly the opposite way. Underplayed to the vanishing point, it left the audience wondering whether they had lost their hearing or the actors had lost their voices. With the pace a solemn largo, The Wild Duck, possibly the greatest play in the modern theatre, might have got by as a genteel pantomime had there been any gestures.