New Play in Manhattan

The Emperor's Clothes (by George Tabori) is theatrically an in-&-outer and artistically a might-have-been. Playwright Tabori (Flight Into Egypt) has yoked a fascinating idea for a play to a good deal more familiar one, and the two neither run very well in harness nor altogether keep to the road. Tabori's scene is Budapest in 1930; his atmosphere that of an incipient police state; his chief characters a small boy (Brandon de Wilde) and his father (Lee J. Cobb). The boy inhabits a mental world swarming with such heroes as Sherlock Holmes, Hoot Gibson and the Scarlet pimpernel. But his chief hero is his father, a schoolmaster who has been blacklisted for unorthodox opinions, and who has lost his backbone along with his job.

Suddenly the boy's florid, noised-about fancies bring in the police. They arrest him, then bring him home, only to question and arrest his father. Before he goes off, the father disillusions his hero-worshiping son by spewing forth a lot of ugly facts. But at the final curtain he is more his son's hero than ever.

There could be a terrifying play in what the fantasies of a Tarkingtonian small boy could give rise to in a totalitarian society: the scene in The Emperor's Clothes where two goons grill the father about Hoot Gibson's war on "the cattle barons is a frightening reductio ad absurdum of police state methods. But what might have been a brilliantly sardonic social satire has first been squeezed inside a domestic framework and then dropped from the picture itself. Though the family story has its own realistic interest, it is never made real. Mixing and garnishing his moods at will, Tabori achieved vivid scenes but an unfocused play. The production and acting are uneven also, though in his best scenes Actor Cobb is brilliant.

The Emperor's Clothes has a crashing finale, but what crashes is whatever is left of a serious play. The play takes its name from the Hans Christian Andersen tale in which a small boy is the only person who dares to cry out that the parading Emperor has no clothes on. Tabori's play has all too many clothes on, but there is not much underneath.

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