Dust in Venice

The Aspern Papers (by Michael Redgrave) is a devoted, but unrewarding, act of literary piety, more library dust than drama. In transposing Henry James's story. Actor-turned-Playwright Redgrave has animated a book, not given life to a play.

In a moldering Venetian palazzo in the late 19th century sit two desiccated women. Miss Bordereau (Franchise Rosay) is 100 or so and has wrung life dry; her old-maid niece. Miss Tina (Wendy Hiller), has had life squeezed out of her. In swirls a worldly dandy, Henry Jarvis

(Maurice Evans), a publisher and a cultish worshiper of a long-dead American Byron named Jeffrey Aspern, whose mistress Miss Bordereau once was. Jarvis is avid for literary mementoes--the Aspern papers. He coaxes Miss Tina to be his ally, in terms that seize her poor fluttery soul with a fantasy of love. Upon Miss Bordereau's sudden death, Miss Tina, tormented into boldness, names a price for the papers too devastatingly high for Jarvis to pay--marriage.

Wendy Hiller brings Miss Tina quiveringly to life, at first, touchingly timid, in the end, touchingly rash. Stunningly miscast as the Jamesian relic of a more gracious age. Franchise Rosay, with her Gallic accent and facial gestures, seems rooted in some irascible French family film. Maurice Evans elegantly elocutes lines that might better be spoken, but the talk is a smokescreen for a character that isn't there.

Henry James was a master hint dropper. In the novel of sensibility, a hint often drops with a sizable psychological bang, but in the theater a hint dropping is about the same as one hand clapping.

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