Old Play in Manhattan

The Apple Cart, written in 1929, was perhaps the last of Shaw's plays to kick up any real dust in the theater. Indeed, it marks the point in his career when Shaw began to collect dust as well as kick it up, began to seem stale as well as brilliant. Less the work of a master than of a past master, The Apple Cart still had vital things to say and on occasion a great gift for saying them. There was still the fun of watching a superb showman up to his old tricks-but some of them did seem decidedly old. There was still some satisfaction in watching him chessboard his old ideas-and seem at first blush to contrive new gambits.

Thus The Apple Cart caused a mild furore in 1929 because Socialist Shaw put in a good word, not to say several magnificent speeches, for monarchy. Shaw's English King Magnus is far more public-spirited, high-minded and civilized than the Labor Prime Minister and, as it turns out, a shrewder tactician. Heckled for such a political about-face, Shaw insisted-in one of those prefaces of his which are more like second times at bat-that King and Prime Minister not only are not winner and loser, but are not even basic antagonists. "The conflict," Shaw asserts, "is not really between royalty and democracy. It is between both and plutocracy." King and Prime Minister are thus equally puppets, while it is Breakages, Ltd-England's super-industrialists-who actually rule.

But if Shaw is resounding an old standard theme, he works variations-and even a fantasia-upon it. He can jiggle his royal puppet in the classic role of the Patriot King; he can even make a kind of If-I-Were-King of Magnus. The Socialist Bernard can act a Strong Man on the throne, a Passionless Shepherd in the boudoir. The disbeliever in monarchy can suggest that a constitutional monarch be flagrantly unconstitutional, and can have him retain his throne by threatening to abdicate and prove ten times as troublesome in Parliament.

In the end, it is just as it was at the start. Neither Shaw nor Shaw's King has really upset the apple cart; he has merely tossed out half a dozen Shavian apples of discord. In the end, King and Prime Minister have taken turns producing cards they have up their sleeves, which is a playwright's way of keeping going no less than a politician's. One such playwright's card is to have Breakages, .Ltd. suddenly amalgamate the U.S. and Britain. Another is to throw in a purely irrelevant interlude of sex-or of the lack of it, since when Shaw plays King, the royal mistress isn't really a mistress.

The play probably has enough serviceable tricks, enough scattered brilliance, enough second-bounce for a superlative production to bring the whole thing off. The current production is no more than a very competent one; it cannot convey a needed sense of grand-staircased crescendoes and crystal-chandeliered wit. As Magnus, Maurice Evans has his real virtues, and the right polished utterance, but for parry-and-thrust he uses a gold-headed cane instead of a rapier, and he seems in manner more tutorial than ironic.

Signe Hasso has plenty of lure, but the duet in the boudoir lags. And though Charles Carson makes an excellent Prime Minister, some of his Cabinet members fall short. Yet it is less that the production lets Shaw down than that he himself often needs inordinate holding up.

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