172
PARTISAN REVIEW
alone Poland or Greece, would make of the problems which agitate
Mr. Hart and his characters.
As for Othello, Margaret Webster, using Paul Robeson, has directed
it, with a new emphasis on the black-and-white theme. Mr. Robeson,
unfortunately, is not an actor. His voice is beautiful, and in the early
scenes, where Othello need only be magnificent, he is not over-taxed by
the character. When Othello, however, cracks open, Mr. Robeson can
no longer follow
him,
but remains at a distance from the role; even in
murder he is courteous and dignified, the well trained concert performer.
The direction is bad, clumsy especially in the handling of groups. It is
Jose Ferrer's Iago that is the star-piece of this production. He manages,
in his soliloquies, to demonstrate the trance-like, solitary, almost visionary
character of !ago's dream of evil, which like God's dream of the world,
he makes incarnate on earth. The division of !ago's nature between the
man as good fellow and the man as destroyer is well established by
Mr. Ferrer; this distinction is usually lost by actors who play Iago as
Mephistopheles.
The Voice of the Turtle,
while not a serious or particularly well
written play, makes an original contribution to the stage. John Van
Druten has discovered for the theatre a new American type, a type with
whom we are all familiar in life but have not seen behind the foot–
lights. This is the character played by Margaret Sullavan; she is the
well-brought-up American girl who, at twenty-one, has had two affairs,
yet remains at heart a virgin, an innocent, a perennial -spinster who will
always be more in love with her apartment, her flowers, her possessions,
her treasury of quotations from poetry, than with any man she sleeps
with, whose bed the morning after a sexual adventure will always be
made up, with the spread indented under the pillows, while coffee for
two drips in the Silex: and toast pops out of the electric toaster. This is
the eternal college girl, who will be windswept and hatless at forty, and
whose old age no one so far can predict. Mr. Van Druten has been both
honest and observant in recording the details of this girl's behavior; he
does not shrink from showing the audience the realistic underpinnings
of her romantic affair with the soldier who happens to arrive at her
apartment; he sees that it is all a matter of propinquity, of
faute de
mieux,
an evening on one's hands, a girl who has stood one up and a
married man who has got tired of one's intensity. Mr. Van Druten goes
so far but no further; he presents the type and weaves a light, rather
cute, comedy around her; he does not venture on into analysis or satire,
with the result that the play has no third act and remains a play for
women, a play at which women can smile tenderly and a little fatuously,
relaxing happily in self-love as the heroine relaxes
in
her bath. Men are
out of place at this play, just as a real soldier would find himself vio–
lently out of place in that apartment.
MARY McCARTHY
