New Play in Manhattan

The Wookey (by Frederick Hazlitt Brennan, produced by Edgar Selwyn). Mr. Wookey, a tugboat captain, is a little Cockney who runs his East End family with as much assurance as Winston Churchill runs the British Empire. From the day before Britain enters World War II through the height of last September's great Blitz, he and his family go through blood and tears and low comedy.

The audience loves it and for a good reason. The Wookey is something that a large part of the English-speaking world still delights in: the humor of Punch, Every character, every situation, every line in the play (except a few words spoken out that Punch would print as --s) has had its counterpart in Punch during the last 100 years. The Wookey, a grandchild of this traditional British humor, proves that there is still life in the Punch line.

But half the life in The Wookey comes from Edmund Gwenn, an actor with a capacity for making mediocre parts seem masterpieces of playwriting. In the cinema Foreign Correspondent, as an eerie minor villain who tried to push hero Joel McCrea off a tall tower, in The Earl of Chicago as a gentleman's gentleman who looked after gangster Robert Montgomery, he stole whole scenes from the principals. But as Mr. Wookey he steals nothing; the play is handed to him and he runs away with it.

The rest of the cast cannot be blamed for hardly making an impression. Author Frederick Hazlitt Brennan, onetime newspaperman, short-story writer and sometime playwright, forgot to provide his play with more than one character. The rest of his dramatis personae, including a policeman, an A.R.P. warden, a British colonel and an Irishman, he apparently picked from the most fatuous stereotypes in Punch's files. He also forgot to provide any dramatic reason for his first act and frequently let his farce run at cross purposes with his blood & thunder.

But if The Wookey isn't much play, it is a lot of show. It not merely makes the humorous best of British courage and obstinacy under trial. It also has a range of breath-taking sound effects, from the audible eruption of a W.C. to German bombing raids (recorded in London). It runs the gamut of the tear-jerking situations which can confront a family in wartime. And it exploits all the emotions aroused in the U.S. by the war--even to political gags at which America Firsters clap and a set (by Jo Mielziner, showing bomb-Blitzed London) which, without a line being spoken, draws a round of compassionate applause. No audience can resist The Wookey.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.