Revival

Having praised Leslie Howard not at all and John Gielgud perhaps not enough for their Hamlets, New York critics last week gave the season's third major Shakespearean headliner his just due and then some. As Richard II, Maurice Evans was "thrilling and memorable" to the Herald Tribune, "triumphant" to the Times, "majestic" to the News. Not even the hallowed Edwin Booth, who last revived the role in Manhattan in 1878, could have asked for more. Actor Evans, a mellowed Britisher, trained for his latest royal part as Napoleon in St. Helena and the Dauphin in Katharine Cornell's Saint Joan. The purple sits well on him as he impersonates one of the vainest, cruelest, weakest monarchs the English ever had to tolerate. Sensitive at all times, Actor Evans rises to his greatest dramatic heights when Richard returns from Ireland to "this precious stone set in the silver sea . . . this England" to make the melancholy discovery that he has all but lost his sceptre.

Of this able dramatization of Britain's second royal abdication,* observed famed Liberal Lawyer Morris Ernst on the revival's first night: "It's great, and very appropriate to some recent events in England. Evans makes you sympathetic to a slobby loafing bum of a king when you ought to be against him."

*First was Edward II's in 1327.

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