New & Old Plays in Manhattan

Murder in the Cathedral (by T. S. Eliot; produced by Gilbert Miller & Ashley Dukes). Poetic drama by modern writers has been chiefly the plaything of the Little Theatres or the largess of high-minded or highfalutin producers. With a contemporary background poetic drama seems nerveless, artificial, grandiose. But with a historical background it can still, in the right hands, achieve a noble movement.

This was proved nearly two years ago in Manhattan, when the Federal Theatre successfully produced Murder in the Cathedral. The proof still seemed valid last week when the English production of the play opened in Manhattan after 600 performances abroad.

Playwright Eliot's subject is the slaying of Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170.* In Anglo-Catholic Eliot's hands, Becket (Robert Speaight) stands forth as a tremendous spiritual figure who, before the play begins, has made his choice between Heaven and Earth.

Tempters only arouse his scorn. Assassins only increase his submission. Out of such an attitude comes the play's blazing religious exaltation, its lack of psychological drama. The great heroes of tragedy are inwardly lacerated; Becket is not. Hence the first half of the play is mainly declamatory. But in the second half Poet Eliot's richly cumulative rhetoric takes fire, makes antiphonal voices of his despairing chorus of women, his truculent band of murderers, his central, uplifted archbishop.

Then, at a stroke, the murder. Then, with a counterstroke, the murderers, using mealy-mouthed journalese, try to justify their crime. In this sudden contrast of shoddy human self-seeking with rapt spiritual self-abnegation, Eliot gets in a brutal and final punch.

The Author, Thomas Stearns Eliot is, with Novelist James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, the most famed of living highbrows.

Like them, he is an expatriate. A poet and critic long before he was a playwright alike, in his long poem The Waste Land (1922) and in his brilliant literary essays, he founded a movement. Becoming ever more conservative and religious-minded, Eliot finally, in 1927, stated his position as "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion." All his later works are colored by this credo.

Born in St. Louis in 1888 and a member of the famed Harvard class of 1910 (Columnist Walter Lippmann, Economist Stuart Chase, Radical John Reed, etc.), Eliot left the U. S. in 1914, settled in England, eventually became a British subject.

Dandiacal in appearance, he has acquired an ostentatiously English accent. He once taught baseball in an English school, today writes long letters to the London Time's about cheese, edits the London Criterion.

His U. S. relations regard him as the black sheep of the family, confess that "his poetry still fuddles a lot of us." At present Eliot is working on a modern play laid in an English country house, but with a substratum of Greek drama.

Casey Jones (by Robert Ardrey; pro duced by The Group Theatre). The Sceneryless-Theatne Movement (Julius Caesar, The Cradle Will Rock, Our Toun) got a smack on the jaw last Saturday when the curtain went up on Casey Jones. There, covering the whole stage and appearing to race through the night, stretched a life-sized, glinting locomotive. The audience let loose a tornado of applause. But the rest of Casey Jones, instead of roaring straight ahead, backed in and out of rail road yards, got shunted off on sidings.

The play has to do with an engine driver named Casey Jones (Charles Bickford).

The theme is good, the plot bad. The theme is that of the employe who eats, sleeps and is married to his job. The plot is the all too obvious one about the engineer whose eyesight fails him.

As in his current How To Get Tough About It (TIME, Feb. 21 ), Playwright Ardrey in Casey Jones shows talent not yet under control. He shuttles between comedy and tragedy, reality and make-believe, Hollywood and Provincetown.

Once he seriously decides where he wants to go, he will probably get there.

Once Is Enough (by Frederick Lonsdale; produced by Gilbert Miller). Ten minutes after the curtain rose last week on Once Is Enough, nobody in the audience could have sworn that it was not 1928. For a Frederick Lonsdale comedy, full of fishwife manners but ducal breeding, was unhurriedly finding its stride. Not since 1930 (Canaries Sometimes Sing) had a Lonsdale play softly crackled on Broadway, but most of the audience could probably remember Aren't We All?, Spring Cleaning, The

Last of Mrs. Cheyney, varnished English comedies in straight descent from Oscar Wilde and Sir Arthur Wing Pinero wherein persons of title misbehaved in epigrams.

Last week, after spending several years trying to find a new plot, Playwright Lonsdale turned up with an old one. It led off with a butler, a decanter of port and the Sunday Observer, and soon made plain that the Duke of Hampshire (Hugh Williams) was carrying on with Liz Pleydell (Viola Keats) and that the Duchess (Ina Claire) wasn't going to be too obliging about it. From then on, the situations were as familiar to veteran Lonsdaliers as are way stations to veteran commuters.

Once Is Enough seemed even more dated than deft, appeared at times to be celebrating the love life of ice cubes. The play was chiefly enjoyable for the purring, nimble, coroneted acting of Ina Claire.

The Author-- Frederick Lonsdale is a 57-year-old Englishman who has written 24 plays. But it was not till 1923, with Aren't We All?, that he made a real hit on Broadway. He conceives all his plays as tragedies, writes them all as comedies, because in comedy "you can tell a much deeper story. That's why Shaw wrote comedies."

Easy, charming, Bond-Streetish, Lons dale frequently forgets things, frequently changes his mind. He will invite people to lunch, sail for Europe, remember on the boat, cable his guests to charge the lunch to him. He will cross the Atlantic to at tend rehearsals in Manhattan, suddenly take the first boat back. Once he embarked for the U. S. at Southampton, got off again at Cherbourg.

* Once before this subject succeeded, in verse form, on the stage. Tennyson's Becket, with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, had a good run in the 1890s.

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