Past & Present

In London's famed Madame Tussaud's all the great characters of history are exhibited in wax. On Broadway this season much the same thing is being done in grease paint. Already Abraham Lincoln, Jesse James, Pieter Stuyvesant, Gilbert & Sullivan, Marie Antoinette, Queen Victoria and Oscar Wilde have been on view;* this week brings Danton and Robespierre; the next few weeks promise Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Richard III, General Howe, Queen Elizabeth, Madame Jumel, Lord Byron, Herod and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Such a run on the history books is abnormal. For, despite the theatre's love of dressing up, historical plays are notoriously bad box office. But if the success of such plays as Oscar Wilde and Abe Lincoln in Illinois is due to competent writing and first-rate acting, the vogue for historical plays in general is really a commentary on the times. With war, fascism, strikes, depressions bearing down on all sides, playwrights and audiences alike tend to be confused, disturbed, jittery, and plays laid in the settled past offer a ready form of escape.

Some historical plays, to be sure, are made of sterner stuff and use the past for what it can say to the present. In Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Playwright Sherwood beats the drum for liberal democracy; in Knickerbocker Holiday, the author of High Tor gives comfort to high Tories.

But even if such plays have a message they proclaim it in broad enough terms to avoid the narrowly controversial or flagrantly partisan. And this is significant, not least as box office; for, if, in the commercial theatre, the historical play is a gamble, the "propaganda play" is an out-and-out luxury.

* Queen Victoria and Wilde have appeared twice: in the plays bearing their names, and together in Knights of Song.

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