THEATER CHRONICLE
395
the play's mirth is a kind of high spirits, as after a narrow escape.
This sense of freedom is a great gift to actors. Congreve, unlike
Wilde, has left them something to act.
The Importance of Being Earnest
was, in both senses, too
finished
a play for the stage. There is nothing
for the actors to de;> but read the lines correctly, and Mr. Gielgud, try–
ing to make room for performance, could only add a Jean-to of parody
to what was already a parody structure, as though the Wilde play had
been a naive effusion like
The Drunkard.
The results were a little wintry,
and Mr. Gielgud himself, lacking sportiveness, showed particularly to bad
advantage. With the Congreve, everything is different. The play is not
closed. The dialogue must be weiJ and stylishly spoken, but beyond that
there is a whole field of stage business in which the actors can inven–
tively romp. The contrast, in fact, between the precision of speech and
the horse-play of action is the point; physical existence itself is the jest,
and the curl of Valentine's wig, the turn of Scandal's neat calf begin
that parody of Man that ends in the act of copulation. Anything the
actors can be or do, therefore, accrues to the play's interest. Mr. Gielgud's
gravity, his sensitive, melancholy profile, here become exquisitely' comic
-he looks like a tiglon with a heart. And Pamela Brown's acting style,
the words dropping measuredly from her lips as from the most refined
and expensive eye-dropper, her beauty, the bland, egg-shaped face sliding
gracefulJy down into the long goose neck with no decision of chin inter–
rupting, become an image of the declension of form into the sensual
inane. The notion of the human being as a work of art is played on
wittily throughout the performance by pantomimic allusions to painting.
The poses and gestures appear to come from the conversation-pieces of
Zoffany, and the scene when Valentine is found in a Disordered Bed is a
plate out
of
Rowlandson. These continual references to painting not only
set the play, visually speaking, in a social world the eye can remember,
preserving it thus from abstraction; they also force the spectator into the
mood of the connoisseur, a mood, that is, of detachment, to which parody
appears not an indignity but the truest compliment to an Author. This
production is, in all its details, a buoyant act of perception unique in
today's theater.
MARY McCARTHY
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