New Plays in Manhattan

The Immoralist (adapted by Ruth & Augustus Goetz from Andre Gide's novel) is perhaps the most outspoken treatment of homosexuality that Broadway has seen. Very likely it is also the most serious and dignified. Though treating nothing prissily with kid gloves, Playwrights Goetz treat everything clinically with rubber ones. Unlike Gide's spiritually autobiographical novel, the play is less the study of a man than the story of a marriage.

As Michel, a young French archeologist, is about to leave for North Africa, a young girl with whom he has grown up confesses her love. Fond of her and desperately hoping, he marries Marcelline; but North Africa, where homosexuality is rife, quickly complicates rather than resolves their problem. Michel succumbs, while the anguished, wholly disillusioned and half-deserted Marcelline takes to drink. Finding she is pregnant, she leaves Michel and goes back to France. He follows her there, and partly because of their coming child, partly because they are both so lost, they decide to remain together, clutching wildly at the straw of a "middle way."

The Immoralist is an impressively honest study, at once understanding and detached. It chronicles the numbed suffering of a life-defrauded woman; the guilty sinning of a basically moral man. But both the negatively rather than affirmatively tragic nature of the tale and the forthright yet emotionless nature of the telling are somewhat at odds with the genius of the theater. There is a little the air of a case history, yet without quite enough documentation, let alone drama. The play is accurate and revealing, but only in the way a blueprint is. Gide's novel, though not very creative, is much less explicit and more complex; in the play every character--corrupt Biskran houseboy, self-accepting homosexual shepherd--articulates a philosophy, is "placed" in the moral landscape. Everything is formulated rather than expressed.

The play remains, however, an effective formulation. As Michel, Cinemactor Louis Jourdan is excellent throughout; as Marcelline, Geraldine (Midsummer) Page is uneven but has excellent moments.

Compared to the current Tea and Sympathy (TIME, Oct. 12), The Immoralist is nowhere as good theater, but neither is it a mere matinee play.

The Confidential Clerk (by T. S.

Eliot) finds the author of The Cocktail Party once again using the drawing room as a vestibule to the secret places of the heart. It shows him once again convinced, as a basis for seriousness, of the importance of being frivolous. It proves him once again--in his ability to make people speculate, argue, disagree--a master showman. But it is not, in the end, a successful play.

The Confidential Clerk wears a full-length farcical overcoat; on the outside, all is mistaken identity and mixed-up parentage. It opens with Sir Claude Mulhammer, a financier who yearns to be a potter, taking on as private secretary his illegitimate son, Colby Simpkins--a young man who yearns to be an organist. If Sir Claude's wife, Lady Elizabeth, should take a liking to Colby, Sir Claude means to adopt him. Already part of the household are Lucasta Angel, his illegitimate daughter, and B. (for Barnabas) Kaghan, a foundling whom Lucasta plans to marry. Lady Elizabeth too, in her youth, had an illegitimate son whom she lost all trace of; and being a woman with a flutter-brained, highhanded contempt for facts, she decides that Colby is her son, not Sir Claude's.

Eventually, with the help of Colby's aunt, Mrs. Guzzard, things are cleared up. Sir Claude, it turns out, is not Colby's father, while Mrs. Guzzard is his mother instead of his aunt. And though Colby is not Lady Elizabeth's son, B. Kaghan is.

In its chronicle of three characters in search of a parent, its use of knowledgeable servants and titled sinners, its display of highborn eccentricity, its going in for shameless interruptions at climactic moments, The Confidential Clerk is the glaringly legitimate offspring of Gilbert & Sullivan and Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest. Its tone, moreover, is often as artificial as its plot is absurd. But plainly, Eliot's bantering is only skin-deep; plainly his "Who am I?" is no mere parlor game, but a cry from the heart; and his reshufflings of parentage involve revelations about life. Beneath the surface lurk some very large questions about this world and the next, about people's true identities, true vocations, true way of happiness, about human fathers and God the Father. Few people can be first-rate artists, Eliot seems to be saying, as he said in The Cocktail Party that few can be saints. And the characters emerge with changed selves no less than changed status.

Yet the play--however seriously meant or in places skillfully contrived--comes off largely a parlor game. The characters get to know themselves better than the audience knows the characters; the play means too much to mean--as a felt experience--much of anything at all. The meaning is not rooted in the farce, only squeezed out of it. In The Cocktail Party, the very symbol of a cocktail party, the central role of the psychiatrist, the prevailing Noel Coward morality and manners, expressed something immensely relevant to modern life; audiences might fiercely quarrel with Eliot's cure, but they could not deny the disease. But The Confidential Clerk pierces to the spirit without cutting through any flesh. There are moments of illumination, but in general the story, even where symbolic, remains absurd.

Nor does The Confidential Clerk come off too well at the drawing-room level. Written in verse that has all the ease, and even the sound, of prose, the play is admirably articulate, sometimes elegant and sharp. But the play's movement is often slow and cumbrous, and its wit is much of the time labored and thin. The play picks up in interest as it proceeds, but is one of those rare works that have plot but no story; much is unraveled but very little unfolds. Nor is the production everywhere first-rate. Ina Claire, returning after seven years to Broadway, plays Lady Elizabeth brilliantly; and as Lucasta, English Actress Joan Greenwood is mannered but fascinating. But Claude Rains's Sir Claude is too monotonous, and Douglas Watson's Colby too priggish. However accomplished and distinctive in places, The Confidential Clerk suggests a clever prestidigitator rather than the greatest poet alive.

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