New Play in Manhattan

Sheppey (by W. Somerset Maugham; produced by Jacques Chambrun) reached Broadway eleven years after it appeared in London. The last play which Maugham wrote alone is not too shining a valedictory. The hand that wrote this good-by was a little tired, a little cold.

Sheppey (well played by Edmund Gwenn) is a perky London barber who wins -L-8,500 in a sweepstakes, decides to give his money to the poor, begins by bringing home a streetwalker and a thief. From there on the cynic and ironist in Maugham have a field day. Sheppey, his family feels sure, must be off his chump. The harlot and the thief, bored stiff by the good life, scamper back to the bad one. For a final joker, Maugham shows that the exemplary Sheppey really is sick: he has been having visions of a strange woman, who turns out to be Death and comes, at the end, to claim him.

Imagining the world's reaction to a kind of modern-Jesus is, if an old idea, always a provocative one. Sheppey has cleverness and a certain intellectual bite. But Sheppey, the work of a man too frosty to be either greatly amused or indignant, never really foams into comedy or explodes into drama. And Sheppey, like most barbers, talks too much; indeed, everybody talks too much, but nobody too well.

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