New Plays

This Was a Man. Precocious Noel Coward, incessant tosser-off of suavely sexual plays, tossed this one off a bit too carelessly. Though the Lord Chamberlain suppressed the piece in London, Broadway showed signs last week of yawning at one more husband world-wearily indifferent to his cuckoldom.

The wife (Francine Larrimore) is given ample scope for gliding sinuously from chair to chair and finally into the bed of her husband's friend, Major Bathurst (Nigel Bruce), just prior to the second act curtain. When the Major, personifying the stalwart virtues of the British Army, turns upon Miss Larrimore with a tongue-lashing for her immorality, the audience can almost imagine itself listening to the scene in Playwright Coward's Vortex wherein the son flayed his mother for her debauchery. Next year young Mr. Coward

will doubtless write this scene into another play with an even more successful stench. Last week his "new twist" was to let the Major succumb to the wife after tongue-lashing her, and then to bring the husband wistfully on the scene.

The Witch. If her lines or "business" contain any dramatic quality at all, Alice Brady conveys it surely and deftly over the footlights. Her work in The Witch is one of the season's brilliant feats.

The play, translated by John Masefield from the Norwegian of Wiers-Jenssen, is not so happily inspired. It seems amorphous in character. Starting with the revelation that witchcraft was a medie val actuality, it proceeds to trace the growth of witch-power in young Anne Pedersdotter, second wife of the old village pastor, guilty sweet heart of his son. To satisfy her love, she casts the spell of death upon her old husband. Accused by her mother-in-law, she shrinks from the trial by touch and oath, confesses with a wail of misery and despair her witchcraft, goes to feed another Lutheran bonfire.

Act I discloses the populace in pursuit of a witch, made fearsomely real by Mme. Ouspenskaya; Act II: Anne's growing consciousness that she too is of the devil's tribe. Just as the crisis begins to crys tallize, the medieval conception of passion as the spirit of Lucifer takes hold. Immediately, the audience is persuaded to see Anne not as a witch but as a woman of more than ordinary emotional capacity. Even the murder of her husband is extenuated by a plausible explanation of heart failure. Hence, confusion. There is a catastrophe, but it is not so much inevitable as erroneous. About to be burned, Miss Brady gave vent to her favorite repertoire of ear splitting, nerve-searing shrieks, seemed on the verge of rabies.

Up the Line is the current Harvard Prize Play. Taking the in teresting character of a working hobo, the fascinating theme of wanderlust, Playwright Henry Fisk Carlton scrambles out a play that, seemingly, is bound for nowhere in particular. Slug, a roving farmhand, marries a hired girl. She shrinks from announcing to him the expected advent of Slug Jr., wherefore he, unhampered by consciousness of impending paternal responsibilities, takes to the high road once more. When he returns after seven years, he discovers his daughter (surprise!) and his former wife in the home of another man, a sedentary creature who has taken on the domestic burdens for the entire period, is entitled, therefore, by law, to permanent possession of both woman and child. So Slug roams off again. Louis Calhern makes him a most engaging wanderer.

La Locandiera. Goldoni's "classical" 18th century Italian comedy is sandwiched in between the more substantial fare of tragic offerings ordinarily provided at the Civic Repertory Theatre.* La Locandiera, the Mistress of the Inn (Eva Le Gallienne) breaks through the crust of a woman-hater, the cavalier Ripafratta, finds him quite soft inside, then jilts him and marries her headwaiter. An old play, it is presented with all its venerable tokens of age (soliloquies, asides, good and evil characters) yet not subjected to the snickers of sophisticated production.

Mozart. What palpitations of the heart are inspired in worldly Pari sian ladies by the virginal naivete of a blooming youth is the theme of Sacha Guitry's/- play. Interest is added by making that youth Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whom history has already surrounded with romance and pathos.

The production disappoints. Irene Bordoni, brilliant, charming in her own, more Aphroditian sphere, as a young man, indifferent. Masculine naivete differs from the feminine: it exacts of an actress a talent at least equal to Maude Adams'. The lines have either suffered in translation or the good people of London and Paris, in their enthusiasm for glorifying Mozart, read a great deal into them. One or the other may explain why the play succeeded on the Continent while failing to stir the North American emotions. The music by Reynaldo Hahn is undistinguished.

Young Wolfgang goes back Salzburg in the end with a tidy score against the French husbands.

John Anderson: "The Beauteous Bordoni, plush-pantied . . . idled about in ... a star vehicle which drama is on leave of absence."

*Other plays produced this season by this organization: Chekhov's The Three Sisters (TIME, Nov. 8), Benavente's Saturday Night (TIME, Nov. 15), Ibsen's The Master Builder (TIME, Nov. 15), Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman (TIME, Nov. 29). Prices range from 50 cents to $1.50.

/-Famed actor-author-manager, husband of famed Comedienne Yvonne Printemps; son of the great actor-manager Lucien Guitry. M. Sacha Guitry's dramas appear on the stages of every land including the Scan dinavian.