New Play in Manhattan

Darkness at Noon (adapted by Sidney Kingsley from Arthur Koestler's novel; produced by the Playwrights' Company) dramatizes, on the whole, very well. Not only does much of it prove dramatic on the stage, but the drama has been bought at a sense-making price. The play keeps faith with the book: the brushwork is necessarily broader, but the framework has been kept intact. It remains a vivid memento of the Moscow trials, a sharp probing of the Communist mind.

Kingsley's N. S. Rubashov is, like Koestler's, a fallen intellectual commissar whose own harsh weapons have been turned against him. He will soon be shot, but, because of his importance, he must be made to confess his "crimes." He remains the old-line Bolshevik who does confess, who does die a Communist, though the Communism he dies for is not his own.

The drama herebeyond the simple one of prisoner and policeis that between one political generation and another. On the one hand are the pre-Stalinist revolutionaries, Rubashov and his cynical inquisitor Ivanovmen who only closed their minds after philosophy had opened them; who abandoned all morality for what seemed to them moral reasons; who were Communists enough to denounce pity, but men enough to understand it. On the other hand, there is the young, completely Sovietized Gletkin whose fanaticism signifies not intensity of feeling but all inability to feel, who is more mechanism than organismRubashov's ideological offspring who murders his father.

Darkness at Noon has managed to appeal to the mind in the theater, and not simply to inflame the emotions; to ask whether absolutist ideas can exist without absolutist methods, whether life which systematically ignores the human factor can preserve a human form. As a play, Darkness at Noon manages, by means of flashbacks and a divided stage, to convey Rubashov's relations with various party members and inquisitors. What is chiefly lost in the theater is Rubashov's relations with himself. The story also slumps here & there, and the love elementthough politically pertinentoften has a familiar, rather bourgeois look.

In the extremely long role of Rubashov, Claude Rains gives a brilliant performance, nicely counterpointed by Walter J. Palance's chilling Gletkin.

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