THEATER CHRONICLE
THE SPOILS OF THE SEASON
In a fairly brisk and excited autumn season, Eliot's
The Cock–
tail Party
continued its unexpected run, promising to become the high–
brow Harvey.
Meanwhile Christopher Fry threatens to supplant Eliot
as the man to bring about the long-expected marriage between modern
poetry and the popular stage. Fry is author of one play now on Broad–
way,
The Lady's Not for Burning,
and translator of another,
Ring
Round the Moon.
And of the two his own play has been the greater
success so far. With its first-rate cast (John Gielgud and Pamela Brown),
its
fifteenth-century setting, its blank-verse medium, its story of a
mi~an
thropic ex-soldier who wants to be hanged and a life-loving
girl
who,
condemned as a witch, insists on being spared,
The Lady's Not for
Burning
got an astonishing press in New York as it had done in London
where it originated. All varieties of taste appear to have been gratified
by it; even so vigilant a critic of the precious as Wolcott Gibbs was
reduced to a state of nervous half-consent.
By comparison my own response to
The Lady's Not for Burning
was
less happy. I don't know whether the play actually claims to be robustly
Elizabethan. To me it is a question, not whether the play is really robust
but whether it is alive at all. And it seems to be alive only when it is
being fey and funny in the style of a Noel Coward, perhaps, instead of
a Marlowe. ("What, after all, / Is a halo? It's only one more thing
to keep clean.") Other shortcomings of the piece are allied to the
familiar ones of undergraduate operetta: the plot is over-busy; the
meaning is murky; and most of the situations, instead of getting them–
selves resolved, merely collapse under their own weight. On one occasion,
for example, the heroine seems about to choose between being burned
as a witch and giving herself to a young lecher who promises to set her
free. She considers for some time; quite interests us in her problem;
whereupon the hero simply reappears from somewhere, threatens the
lecher, and changes the subject. The hero, again, is assigned various
motives for his principal obsession: disgusted with things, he wants a
conspicuous death ; and he hopes, besides, to divert attention from the
alleged witch. But these reasons, if they do not logically cancel each
