New Plays in Manhattan

Jane Eyre, the novel, was always faintly absurd and decidedly lurid. But to a story bordering on trash, Charlotte Bronte brought storytelling bordering on genius. Told by uncoy, buffeted, orphanage-bred Jane herself--who comes as governess to Thornfield Hall, where the Byronic Mr. Rochester has a mad wife hidden away--Jane Eyre advances, in a rush of words, with a beat of real emotion.

A. & P. Heir Huntington Hartford's stage adaptation is Jane Eyre virtually without Jane, and chunks of the story with no hint of the storytelling. Everything stagiest about the book--the gruffly romantic hero, the pasteboard aristocrats, the burning of Thornfield, the blinding of Rochester--has been transferred to the stage; what results, not unnaturally, suggests the stage of 1870. Everything personally intense and imaginative has vanished; something crucial--the time element that shapes crises and aids credibility--has been destroyed. For an act, as the emotional furniture is set in place in Designer Ben Edwards' gloomy, fan-vaulted hall, Eric Portman--playing Rochester in the manner of a wholly masculine Tallulah Bankhead--wards off collapse. But Jan Brooks is never Jane. Adapter Hartford's hand is never skilled, and things more and more creak till what goes up, quite melodramatically in smoke, is not so much Thornfield Hall as a mass of theatrical deadwood.

The Firstborn (by Christopher Fry), begun in 1938, was first staged in 1948 at the Edinburgh Festival. A stiffly earnest play, it is laid in Egypt and centered in Moses. With the Pharaoh persecuting the Jews, a Moses already estranged from the palace of his upbringing turns wholly to the people of his birth. In the conflict, Pharaoh's young son Rameses sympathizes with the oppressed: but when the firstborn in every Egyptian family is struck down, the humane royal firstborn perishes with the rest.

The cry at the end is the classic one over "the bewildering mesh of God." over why the innocent must suffer with the guilty, how leaders must move forward stricken with guilt. It is a searching enough theme to build a play around, though scarcely a key theme for a play about Moses. But the real trouble is that Fry offers so little to build with--neither real dramatic bricks nor real psychological stones, only philosophic shards and ethical bits of glass. A story that, told as vivid theater, might blaze with Biblical fire, seems quite unwarmed. A story that, recounted as high drama, might seem grandly severe, seems elaborately hollow. Set against the Moses of Michelangelo, Fry's Moses seems solemnly carved out of soap.

If, despite graphic moments, The Firstborn is a lifeless failure, it is less that Fry had not yet acquired a rhetoric than that he had misapplied it. His literary conceits, his verbal arabesques suffocate anything truly alive. Half don, half dandy, Fry was to find himself in mannerism rather than substance, in the mocking wink rather than the observing eye. Despite Katharine Cornell's regal efforts as Pharaoh's sister, or trumpet-voiced Anthony Quayle's as Moses, the Egypt of The Firstborn is mummified. Only Boris Aronson's sets evoke something once living and still large.

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