New Offering on Broadway

Dear Liar is a "comedy of letters" that Actor-Director Jerome Kilty wove out of the 40-year correspondence between Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Bernard Shaw. What results is no play, nor is it meant to be. Katharine Cornell and Brian Aherne are intentionally dramatic instruments rather than impersonators. In form, the whole thing, which reached Broadway after a road tour of 66 cities, most resembles a set of verbal duets. Adapter Kilty, with an ingenious try, displays neat workmanship, and the two stars have gone gallantly at their rather anomalous roles. But pleasant and provocative as it is, Dear Liar falls flat, and not wholly for dramatic reasons.

Judged (as they generally are) as love letters, these make curious ones; something was always going wrong with the male. Doubtless, temperamental Actress Campbell could be impossible, but tough Playwright Shaw could at times seem inhuman. These were love letters without a love affair; as Stella Campbell said, she and G.B.S. were two "lustless lions at play." And for every coo there was a not-always-brilliant snarl. When she first read Pygmalion, she sniffed: "You made Liza a cockney just to torment me," and he snapped back: "I'm surprised you find it so difficult to be common." But Mrs. Pat must have minded his use of dialect less than his turn for didacticism. Where she was always losing her temper, he was al ways playing the teacher. When she seemed large and unmistakably feminine, he was a touch small as well as neuter.

But what Dear Liar suffers from is less Shaw as lover than Shaw as letter writer, a role in which he falls far short of the dramatist. Things perk up when the stars can get their teeth into something theatrical rather than into each other, as when they go over a scene from Pygmalion. But the stars are not quite wedded to their parts. Unfailingly gracious, Actress Cornell seems too gentle and Actor Aherne seems somehow too jaunty.

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