,
636
PARTISAN REVIEW
seems, had a father complex-but this is not worth troubling about, any
more than the pinch of Catholic ritual in the finale. The play calls for
the same kind of intellectual scrutiny as would a Hollywood movie on
the same subject, no more, and in fact McLeod comes from the movies;
he has been seen quite often before, usually as a Nazi officer. Some of the
people around him could as well
be
in a movie too, and are really very
nice, especially the shop-lifter played by Lee Grant and the two profes–
sional burglars.
In
these characters at least there is an authenticity of a
kind that appears rarely in
Death of a Salesman,
and the general romp–
ing around the stage is well handled.
It
is the more the pity, therefore, that Mr. Kingsley should have
felt obliged to take to the rostrum and attribute to himself the most
extraordinary socio-political intentions, none of which are to be detected
in the play.
It
is a pity because it falsifies the play in question, which
has after all its own tough little graces, and the more so because it is
symptomatic of the ugly confusion that more and more is keeping literary
talent out of the theater, and that permits such a show as
Death of a
Salesman
to be hailed as the genuine articIe-genuine play-wrighting,
that is, not genuine Broadway. Both of these plays qualify very well for
that.
Eleanor Clark
