THEATER CHRONICLE
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and more risky, given the context, as time goes on. However, what with
the eggs, the Dauphin, the brilliance of more than one kind concerning
Church and State, and the unlikelihood of any other playwright's doing
a better Joan, it is a role that will no doubt go on troubling leading
actresses for at least a few centuries.
There is a woman or Woman problem in the "Don Juan" dialogue
too, of a less ticklish kind, the genius there being straight male. Why this
enthralling "philosophical comedy," as Shaw rightly called it, has never
before been heard in New York, either by itself or as, say, a twice-a-week
lengthening of
Man and Superman,
is hard to imagine; as hard as now,
having seen the First Drama Quartette, to imagine its being done by
anybody else or in any other way than exactly theirs-which is, to
begin with, without sets, "because," as Charles Laughton explains, "we
thought Shaw's stage directions were so beautiful that you ought to hear
them." The props, which may have contributed unfairly to one's im–
patience with the handsome textiles and literal architectures provided by
both Margaret Webster and Laurence Olivier for their Shaws, are the
reading stands, four high kitchen stools, and a great deal of imagination
requisitioned from oneself: at least for that, getting oneself firmly
seated on some blowy point out in the cosmos, the thing is irresistible. A
few objections have been voiced to Charles Boyer's traces of French
accent, in his role of the Shavian philosopher Don Juan, double from
"the mighty dead" for misogynist John Tanner: an initial conceit, or
piece of Shavian polemic, that serves as the dramatic core of the
argument, and Boyer's one arresting mispronunciation happens to help it,
being of the first syllable of
conscious, consciousness,
and
conscience.
One might not have noticed otherwise the extraordinary frequency of
these words in the text. Agnes Moorehead does her brilliant best by
the thankless role of a woman who is only permitted to represent the
Life Force, without even finding anything very bright to say for it; and
Cedric Hardwicke, master of the long silence and the straight face,
makes an excellent Colonel Blimp of her statue-father. Charles Laughton
as the Devil, lover of Art and Beauty, denyer only of ultimate purpose
("though there is much to be learned," Don Juan says, "from a
cynical devil, I really cannot stand a sentimental one"), keeps a wicked
sulphurous wit in his eyes through most of the two hours, does a fine
job of choking with laughter at death, and a still finer one of turning
the Devil, for a few seconds of breathtaking bravura, into a political
demagogue. Boyer's face is not his fortune in this instance: he holds it as
though it might crack; what he brings to the performance as few modern
actors could, and what it cannot do without, is classical recitation in
