104
PARTISAN REVIEW
for the lady herself, in the vivid performance of Lucile Watson, and for
her sleek and showy world. With a minimum of ominousness the play
celebrates the France of 1912: the pomp, the fashions (hobble-skirts
instead of "sheaths"), even the class distinctions which we are to suppose
made life adventurous. And the play's Broadway production is perfect,
entailing several first-rate performers, a modish but admirably consistent
taste,
and~presumably-a
large capital outlay. The curtains by Dufy
are conspicuous waste; but Poulenc's occasional music is indispensable.
And the Raymond Sovey set, representing a winter-garden attached to
a French chateau, is magnificent of its kind and reveals a mysterious
capacity to become more so as the play progresses. Cheerfully elegant in
the morning light of the first scene, it gets increasingly splendid as even–
ing comes on, and the ball guests begin to arrive in their diabolically
stylish gowns, and the cakes and ices are laid out; and then in the final
dawn, to the crackle of belated fireworks, it grows expectantly dewy
and incandescent. This set is the appropriate image of a play in which,
although the moon's ring may be only a compunctious afterthought, the
moon itself is unquestionably there.
John Vanbrugh's
The Relapse,
first acted in London in 1696, and
currently revived by the Theatre Guild in conjunction with the Brattle
Street Company, is another worldly comedy. But very different is the
world it presents: entirely secure in its style, humor and brutality; quite
free of remorseful sentiment and compensatory moralizing.
The Relapse,
as it happens, was written to defy a rising Puritanism which was soon
greatly to modify Vanbrugh's conditions; yet the play itself
succeed~
in making those conditions appear immutable. That was clearly its in–
tention and accounts largely for its triumph. Compared to the best work
of Congreve,
The R elapse
is not a great play. The code of the Restora–
tion beau, which Congreve transforms into a kind of poetic sensibility,
is for Vanbrugh only common sense, when it
is
not simply a weapon
against the Puritans. Yet the latter's play, impregnable in its self-assur–
ance, unremitting in its assault upon the prude, the upstart and the
bumpkin, is still effective. And acted with artful vehemence by Cyril
Ritchard and an excellent company, it makes the best revival of an old
play that I have seen since Gielgud's
Love for Love.
Especially remark–
able are the scenes, full of detail and movement, in Sir Tunbelly's forlorn
Gothic castle, which looks, as Fashion says, "like Noah's ark, as if the
chief part on't were designed for the fowls of the air, and the beasts
of the field."
I
I '
In our own dealings with Puritanism in America we have never
