New Plays in Manhattan

Oscar Wilde (by Leslie & Sewell Stokes; produced by Norman Marshall). The most lurid of modern scandals, the story of Oscar Wilde has been reverberating between the lines of memoirs and biographies for 40 years. To picture the gross yet elegant, affected yet honest, repellent yet fascinating figure who plunged from dazzling fame to indelible disgrace, is to tackle a subject even more difficult than it is dramatic. Leslie & Sewell Stokes have treated the story in the only possible right way: they have told the plain, unvarnished truth.

Compactly put together, Oscar Wilde tells simply of its hero's downfall. It passes up Wilde's early days: his blue-china period at Oxford, his lily-and-sunflower posturings caricatured by Gilbert & Sullivan in Patience, his visit to the U.S. when he told the customs officers that he had nothing to declare but his genius. It introduces him at the height of his fame, spouting epigrams and penning paradoxes, when his intimacy with young Lord Alfred Douglas has aroused the furious opposition of Douglas' father, the Marquis of Queensberry. Soon Queensberry has goaded Wilde into suing him for libel; the suit is lost and Wilde at once brought to trial on charges of pederasty. He is found guilty and sent to prison for two years. Some time after his release he goes to Paris, wearing out his life in drink, a pitiable but unreformed and unrepentant man.

An honest, nimble play, Oscar Wilde is made a much more important one by British Actor Robert Morley's performance of the title role. Already known to U.S. cinemagoers for his fine Louis XVI in the current Marie Antoinette, Morley achieved stage fame overnight for his Oscar Wilde. From start to finish he is Wilde: whether softly purring his feline epigrams ("Frank [Harris] is asked to all the best houses--once"; "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing"); or fighting in court, desperate and cornered, for his freedom; or sinking out of life, bloated and weary, in the tarnished exile of a Paris bistro.

Abe Lincoln in Illinois (by Robert E. Sherwood; produced by the Playwrights' Company). First production of the five playwrights (Maxwell Anderson, S.N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice, Robert E. Sherwood) who last season decided to form an independent producing unit, Abe Lincoln in Illinois should see them triumphantly launched. An episodic story of Lincoln from his early Ann Rutledge days to his election as President, it once more demonstrates the magic of the Great Emancipator's personality.

Lincoln is the most living and appealing figure in U.S. history because he expresses with the greatest glow the national dream of democracy and freedom. He is therefore, in addition to being a warm, sturdy, exciting human being, a permanent symbol who serves U.S. drama as the house of Atreus served the Greek, or as Faust and Don Juan serve the writers of the world. Lincoln's story is well-known, well-loved, an advantage for the playwright greater than the most smashing plot would be; for an audience bringing with it a quivering mass of associations is ready beforehand to participate in the playwright's particular interpretation of Lincoln's life.

Playwright Sherwood's interpretation is the child of the hour. Psychologically his Lincoln, beautifully played by Canadian-born Actor Raymond Massey, is familiar enough: a salty, sinewy smalltown fellow* cursed with a submerged streak of loneliness and bitterness, plagued by an unsympathetic wife and haunted by an unshakable sense of doom. But Sherwood's chief interest in Lincoln is spiritual, not psychological: it consists of vividly, though not altogether convincingly, tracing Lincoln's growth from an indolent, unambitious "artful dodger" who wanted to be left alone, to a suddenly aroused and embattled champion of human rights. And Sherwood is interested in that Lincoln for what he can symbolize to the world today.

Sherwood does not indulge in any awkward sermonizing. Instead, he quotes from Lincoln's own vibrant speeches, particularly the famed "House Divided" one, and lets their message carry forward into the present. Abe Lincoln in Illinois is a frequently inexpert play, slow in getting started, discontinuous in structure, too literary in some of its writing, too emotional in some of its appeal. But it is also a fervent play, burning fiercely with the spirit of what Lincoln, rightly or wrongly, has come to stand for in the hearts of his countrymen.

Hamlet (by William Shakespeare; produced by Maurice Evans). Biggest Shakespeare news in the theatre last season was a Julius Caesar cut to half its ordinary size. Biggest Shakespeare news this season may well be a Hamlet swollen to twice its usual bulk. Last week Actor-Manager Maurice Evans (Richard II) rang up the curtain at 6:30 p.m. on "the first uncut Hamlet in New York" before a half-fashionable, half-earnest first-night audience who sat back grimly in their seats and waited to see if they could take it. When, after allowing a half-hour intermission for dinner, Evans rang down the curtain at 11:20, the audience proved how they could take it by giving him a deafening ovation.

Evans had shown that an uncut Hamlet is no stunt, but an illuminating and vital enlargement of the world's most famous play. Shakespeare's tragedy, smudgily superimposed on centuries of older material, muddied by contradictory First Quartos and Folios, bristling with controversial motivations, above all dealing with a chief character as baffling as he is baffled, is truly--in Critic T.S. Eliot's phrase--"the Mona Lisa of literature." Its elucidation requires not so much scholars as detectives.* When seen on the stage in its full proportions, Hamlet is possibly more of a riddle than ever; but at least, by offering the spectator all the clues, it gives him a far better chance to guess for himself. In the usual acting version, Hamlet confines itself to a single complex character study; uncut, it becomes also a swirling, tumultuous drama of court life and court intrigue. Such characters as Polonius, Fortinbras, the King take on added size. Denmark's dark, uneasy political fortunes constantly impinge upon the action. Some of the problems which have haunted generations of scholars, but scarcely occurred to casual playgoers, suddenly stand out: why, for example, the murdered King's brother and not his son should succeed him on the throne.

Said Actor Evans in his first-night curtain speech: "I wanted to produce a Hamlet which was a play and not a study of dyspepsia." No dyspeptic Hamlet, no sick and sable cat languishing about the stage is golden-voiced Actor Evans. His Hamlet is energetic, excitable, even imperious--so much a man of action that he seems least typical when he ponders and procrastinates. Rightly unwilling to play Hamlet as a moony, weakling Prince, Evans perhaps went too far in giving him a dash of Lionel Strongfort, perhaps was indulging in bold showmanship rather than profound interpretation.

As a play, however, the current Hamlet is the most exciting one Broadway has seen in many a year.

I Have Been Here Before (by J.B. Priestley; produced by Gilbert Miller) is not idly named; by & large, Playwright Priestley offered it to Manhattan last season as Time and the Conways. In both plays, Priestley expounds his mystical theories concerning men's lives as recurrent phases. But in Time and the Conways characters can foresee the future without altering it, while in I Have Been Here Before they can, with an effort of will, circumvent destiny and slip out of a lower groove into a higher one.

For his theories, Priestley acknowledges a debt to Philosopher P.D. Uspenski. Despite some good writing, the play gets so woozy with mysticism that it carries its story forward at the crawl of a glacier. Perhaps Priestley's true achievement in time-juggling is to make two hours in the theatre seem more like two weeks.

* Dug up by Playwright Sherwood was a characteristic Lincoln crack concerning his wife's family: "The Todds are very high-grade people. They spell their name with two d's which is pretty impressive when you consider that one d was enough for God."

* Greatest modern detective: Englishman J. Dover Wilson in his What Happens in Hamlet (Macmillan, $3.50).

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