New Plays in Manhattan

The Cocktail Party (by T. S. Eliot; produced by Gilbert Miller) is not a complete success as a play. But it is a major event in the theater. Not only is most of it a very remarkable piece of writing, but it is of a different order and it operates at a different level from any new play that Broadway has offered in years.

It is a long, religious, didactic play, in verse. Yet it has the character of a psychological study, of drawing-room comedy, of domestic drama. It begins significantly with a cocktail party, emblem of all that is frivolous, ephemeral and heterogeneous in modern life. Characteristically, one guest is a stranger even to the host. The hostess is absent--called, her husband explains, to the sickbed of an aunt.

Actually, Lavinia Chamberlayne has left her husband. After five years of marriage she and Edward (Eileen Peel and Robert Flemyng) are neither happy nor faithful. Yet when the unknown guest agrees to bring Lavinia back, Edward is curiously glad; and though he has had a much sounder relation with Celia Coplestone (Irene Worth), he now doesn't want her. When Lavinia does come back, she and Edward neurotically taunt each other.

They go for advice to a Harley Street specialist, who turns out to be the stranger at the cocktail party. They both lay their cards on the table face down. The specialist admonishes them for dramatizing themselves and trying to glorify their plight; they are, he says, mere self-deceivers. Actually Edward, who can love nobody, and Lavinia, whom nobody can love, share a common bond of isolation, and will be far happier together than apart. Celia Coplestone comes to the specialist, too, but with a sense of sin and a capacity for humility and atonement: for her, salvation, no matter how arduous, will be necessary. The play ends two years later with another cocktail party, showing the Chamberlaynes adjusted and telling of Celia's death by crucifixion while working among heathen savages.

For Playwright Eliot, the modern world has still the look of a wasteland where drinks and tidbits are served. But his own stony The Waste Land lies now a long way off, for he himself has seen a hopeful way out. His Harley Street specialist is preaching Christian faith as well as Freud, concerned with love as well as sex; and is indeed more spiritual adviser than psychiatrist. After his perplexed visitors have left, he and his assistants drink a libation of red wine--in telling contrast to a frivolous champagne toasting at the cocktail party--and chant for Celia:

Watch over her in the desert Watch over her in the mountain Watch over her in the labyrinth Watch over her by the quicksand.

Up to this peak point of the play, The Cocktail Party, however didactic, is exceedingly effective. The final scene, however, badly overlengthens and considerably flattens and weakens the play; robs it, for all its substance, of the right, full-bodied effect. Dramatically, The Cocktail Party is a number of shining pieces rather than a satisfactory whole.

Yet no recent play combines so much polish with so much weight, or expresses its insights with so much of the gaiety which Stendhal demanded of healthy art. But what is most important is that The Cocktail Party is a kind of triumph of spoken drama. Its author is a master of both language and verse, and his play asks only for performance; it does not require a production full of gauze curtains, revolving stages, trick lighting and various sound effects.

There are no pyrotechnics, even, of language; the brilliance lies in the precision. Much of the verse is spoken--and strikes the ear--as prose; where the emotion or situation intensifies, the rhythm does. Yet there are echoes of Eliot's own verse and a few faintly Elizabethan ones; examples of his skill in having characters pick up one another's phrases like dropped cues; and of speeches in which a key word is repeated several times with fine effect.

Under E. Martin Browne's very careful direction, a cast brought from England speaks the play excellently and acts it well. As the specialist, Alec Guinness plays with a particular, and particularly needed, authority.

The Enchanted (adapted from the French of the late Jean Giraudoux by Maurice Valency; produced by David Lowe & Richard Davidson), whatever its weaknesses as a play, is frequently enchanting. A fantasy, as was Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot, it uses a much slighter and more tremulous fable. Instead of grandly and wackily turning Paris upside down, it delicately turns existence inside out. Half the play merely suggests and evokes, like music; even the solider half is mostly talk.

In a French provincial town suddenly everybody is happy and everything makes sense: the millionaire, for once, doesn't win the lottery or the mother superior the motorcycle. A horrified government inspector arrives to investigate such an unseemly state of affairs, discovers something worse--a pretty young schoolteacher who not only has her own whimsical version of the facts of life, but is seeking the facts of death from a ghost with whom she has romantic rendezvous. The inspector tries in vain to exorcise the ghost, who refuses to vanish until he notices the girl unconsciously responding to a flesh-&-blood suitor. Even then the girl all but dies of losing him; it requires a whole persuasive symphony of mundane attractions to woo her back to life.

All fantasy, as E. M. Forster has said, "asks us to pay something extra" by way of credence or adjustment. In addition, this particular fantasy boasts far better symbolism than it does story. But The Enchanted is saved from any allegorical pallor or patness, from any insistent contrast of illusion with reality (e.g., romantic yearnings for the moon with realistic cultivation of gardens) by its doubling back on itself and by its gay, vigilant irony. Through the inspector, Giraudoux pokes merciless fun at literal-mindedness, practical wisdom, bureaucratic palaver. Yet he knows, and expresses with the sad sparkle of his wit, that man needs feet even more than wings, and must accept reality to survive. But there is yet another turn of the wheel: man need neither flee reality nor accept it; he can deliberately transform, it, as the girl's young suitor does, squeezing undreamed-of poetry out of his highly prosaic job.

Seldom really human but everywhere humane, The Enchanted shimmers with a fine Gallic playfulness. It improvises a quick, ingenious answer for everything, doubtless as a way of saying that there is no certain answer for anything, and that the nearest thing to release from care is a fantasy by Giraudoux. The obvious theater qualities which The Enchanted lacks are richly offset by the rare ones it has. It is rather a shame that the production has just the earthiness needed by the play, the play just the airiness needed by the production. Adapter Valency's version is good and George S. Kaufman's staging far from bad. Leueen MacGrath is charming as the girl, but too monotonous; Wesley Addy is engaging as the suitor, but too stiff. Only Francis Poulenc's music catches the proper note of magic.

The Man (by Mel Dinelli; produced by Kermit Bloomgarden) is young and very dangerous--a paranoiac with a persecution mania who comes to do a day's cleaning for a kindly, middle-aged widow. At first he cleans a little and complains a little. Then he slowly starts manifesting symptoms of mental disorder, conveying suggestions of physical violence. All the while he is also locking doors until the terrified housewife is completely his prisoner. The end is still some way off, but sufficiently gruesome when it comes.

Dorothy Gish and Don Hanmer handle their frightened and frightening roles, their near-hysterical relationship, with decided skill; in fact, their performances are far better than the play. Theatrically, The Man is too low for a hawk and too high for a buzzard: it lacks the proper seriousness of a clinical study, the proper tingle of a thriller. It is not merely that the piece is too slow-moving. The Man depresses instead of exhilarates, sets its audience longing for good wholesome maniacs and fine fancy killers.

Good melodrama, like good farce, has its nonrealistic rules; it lowers actuality to heighten effect. The Man violates the rules. Once criminality is portrayed as a kind of malignant disease, it is hardly better than cancer as a theme for entertainment.

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