"Plain Kate, Bonny Kate"

Few English-speaking schoolchildren get much fun out of the comedies of William Shakespeare. When they grow up they go to see Shakespeare revived by commonplace companies with routine reverence, by theatrical archeologists with tedious authenticity, by smart alecks in modern dress. And for many & many an adult the Bard still remains a bore. With eight Shakespearean revivals slated for Broadway this season, with Hollywood equally active and on the eve of releasing Max Reinhardt's three-hour film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, last week the amount of potential ennui the U. S. amusement industry was about to sell its patrons was terrific. Just at that critical hour the Theatre Guild offered Alfred Lunt & Lynn Fontanne in The Taming of the Shrew. Here, in good faith, was a pleasant comedy to bar a thousand harms and lengthen life.

It was the Lunts' somewhat radical notion that The Shrew needed gaiety and bounce. Accordingly, they have resurrected the possibly anachronistic "Induction," which begins the piece with a troupe of jolly players marching into a nobleman's house with drums and cymbals to beguile him for an evening. In true Elizabethan style, the tale of Petruchio and his truculent bride Katharine is interrupted from time to time while tumblers, a tenor, a troupe of midgets take the stage. Within the play itself, the Lunts have felt free to bring in any amount of extraneous horseplay that might add freshness and fun to their antic. Thus, as plain Kate, bonny Kate and sometimes Kate the curst, Miss Fontanne stalks about in a torn white gown with hair in her eyes, kicks people in the fundament, hurls bedding out a second-story window, rides a fake horse makes one exit seated backward on a donkey. Whereas most actresses play the Paduan minx as though she were a frustrated psychopath, Miss Fontanne plays her as though she were a young tilly simply spoiling for a good licking. Since for the past decade one of the most amusing spectacles on the U. S. stage has been Mr. Lunt licking Miss Fontanne, their fantastic rowing in The Taming of the Shrew is some-thing to see. Also something to see is the pair of them mounted in a little golden chariot at the finale, their quarrel mended, headed upward through a painted sky to further and more fabulous adventures.

First-nighters agreed that the funniest, most charming play now in Manhattan had been written in England three centuries ago.

Squaring the Circle (by Valentine Katayev; translated and adapted by Charles Malamuth and Eugene Lyons; produced by Tri-Art Enterprises). This farce was first staged seven years ago by The Studio (experimental annex) of the Moscow Art Theatre, has since become the most popular of Soviet comedies. More than a million Russians have seen it. It has been produced in Paris, Vienna, London, Rome, Berlin (by Max Reinhardt) and by numerous amateur and stock companies in the U. S. Consistently boisterous and occasionally funny, it is supposed to show that Russians can laugh at the pomposities of Communist doctrine under the tolerant eye of the Soviet high command, which knows a good safety-valve when it sees one.

Serious-minded Vasya (David Morris) and easygoing Abram (Eric Dressier) inhabit a squalid, one-room municipal apartment borrowed from an uproarious poet who has gone to the farms to develop his muscles. Each unknown to the other, they marry-or "register"-on the same day, return with their wives. The congestion is further complicated by the return of the poet with huge biceps. He, however, heroically surrenders his hovel, expecting it to become a "collective Soviet paradise."

Vasya's wife Ludmilla (Beatrice De Neergaard) is a plump, "undeveloped" peasant who cannot join the Party because she insists on retaining such "bourgeois knickknacks" as a canary, sofa pillows, curtains, rubber plants. She also has "medieval notions" about making men comfortable. Abram's wife Tonya (Fraye Gilbert), on the other hand, catechizes her husband on "ideology," hounds him with a book when he is hungry. The couples inevitably end by quarreling with their mates, longing for a rearrangement. When the poet learns what has happened to his collective paradise, he mutters bitterly, "Sabotage!" The rearrangement is effected simply by "unregistering" and "re-registering."*

The Lyons-Malamuth version is reported to be considerably less cautious than that presented in Russia. As staged last week the play includes a ludicrous cartoon of a small, shrill, Leninist stickler who accuses Ludmilla of "right deviations" and insists on "liquidating the canary." Ludmilla defines a bourgeois thus: "A bourgeois is a person who's got something that someone else wants."

*Squaring the Circle thus already shows signs of dating because Soviet authorities have lately taken stern steps to abolish easy divorce (TIME Oct. 7).

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