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PARTI'SAN REVIEW
greatly to do with the quality of the reading, which exactly in its refusal
to be a "production" became the only entirely coherent one around;
but a related fact is that the piece started out as the wildest sort of
experiment toward Shaw's constant aim of reviving classical rhetoric on
the stage.
With all that in the air, or any of it (Caesar turned up later),
the only avowed Morality Play, Christopher Fry's
A Sleep of Prisoners,
looked perhaps a little skinnier and more pretentious than it would
have otherwise, but not much. It would be a very dry season indeed
in which this religious tomfoolery could fool anybody or even keep them
awake, if it had not been helped by the novelty of being presented
in
a church, a handsome and fashionable one besides, on Madison Ave–
nue. That it thrived in any number of English churches throughout
the Festival of Britain says a great deal for the power to addle, either
of churches or of reputation in the theater, Fry having built his pre–
viously with the same bag of tricks applied to subject matter in which
jauntiness could more easily pass for wit, a slick surface for meaning,
and bad poetry for the listener's fault. Both imagination and intellect
are here at a minimum. Two of four soldier prisoners in a church have
a quarrel, which the four proceed to re-create in dreams based on,
and as it works out made extremely foolish by, four best-known scenes
from the Bible: Cain and Abel, etc., ending with Shadrac, Meshac and
Abednego. The line "Affairs are now soul size" conveys the idea, as
well as a fair measure of the verse, which is also spruced up with such
modernities as the enemy being "dirty towzers." However, the pro–
gression can claim to be that of a morality play-from sneers at "All
things great and beautiful," through the fire of retribution, represented
by lights and by writhes and howls on the part of the principals, to:
"Good has no fear; / Good is itself, whatever comes," and "Lord, where
we fail as men / We fail as deeds of time."
The haunt in the case is of course less the Bible than Eliot, whose
failures to create a new religious drama that would be either truly
moving or truly instructive have had, among others, the virtue of be–
ing authentic. Fry, one feels, will have no trouble resuming the more
convenient parlor existentialism of his earlier work, or in going on
to
whatever may suit his particular theatrical knack, so strained under
these solemnities.
Seriousness, Shaw said, is the small man's way of trying to look
big. "By laughter only can you destroy evil without malice, and affirm
good fellowship without mawkishness." He meant such remarks to
apply as far as they do apply, which is very far when there are values
