Revival in Manhattan

Twelfth Night (by William Shakespeare; The Theatre Guild-Gilbert Miller, Producers) was first produced on Candlemas Day, Feb. 2, 1602, in London's Middle Temple Hall, which a few weeks ago was struck by a Nazi bomb. Neither bombs nor centuries seriously alter Shakespeare's comedy. It can be richly indecent as in Measure for Measure, swift and slapstick as in The Taming of the Shrew. It can also be very mild, very mannered--as in Twelfth Night. The Guild production of the play is exquisite, but the net effect is that of a high ritual of antique jokes.

If the play's humor is weak, its potential charm is great, and the Guild's leading players are perfectly at home in the blandishing groove. Helen Hayes makes her Broadway Shakespearean debut (two years ago she played Portia in Chicago) in the role of Viola, who, in boy's clothes, pleads the amorous cause of the Duke of Illyria, Orsino, whom she loves herself. There is little in the part to show Miss Hayes's powers as an upper-case Shakespearean Actress. She scores merely by being Helen Hayes, very feminine despite her striped pantaloons, giving a clear, pliant reading of the part.

The leading Shakespearean actor of this time, Maurice Evans, plays the pompous Malvolio with his usual moist, resonant subtlety of speech. He also adopts a Cockney accent that undoubtedly makes the labored humor of the part more amusing than it really is. Into the pronunciation of the single word '"Run?" he manages to crowd an enormous amount of haughty comedy.

Shakespearean Directrix Margaret Webster who also did Evans's Richard II, Hamlet and Henry IV, Part I, has done her usual best by the Bard. Stewart Chancy has designed Italianate landscapes that loom softly behind the players. Paul Bowles, among the up-&-coming young American composers, has written lingering music for Shakespeare's songs, celebrating love and death with flute, oboe, harp, harpsichord, percussion and muted trumpet. The Bard, in his latest Broadway manifestation, has got all the breaks a playwright could wish. The audience's rewards are less solid.

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