THEATER CHRONICLE
SHEEP 'IN WOLVES ' CLOTHING
The governing idea of Graham Greene's
The Potting Shed
is satmc. What would happen, the playwright inquires, if a miracle
were to occur in the family of a leading rationalist? The answer is
easy: consternation. "A miracle in the family is worse than a murder
case," says one of the characters, gloomily, and that is exactly the
predicament. A young boy, it seems, who had hanged himself in the
gardener's shed was raised from the dead by prayer. This "proof" of
the existence of a deity, naturally, has been an extreme embarrassment
to the rationalist family, and every effort has been bent to cover up
what occurred. The resurrected youth has been hurriedly sent away
to school; the gardener who witnessed the miracle has been pensioned
off. The next twenty years have been devoted to living down the divine
intervention, as though it were a disgrace. The event is blotted out
of the family annals, and the culprit himself, when we meet him–
now approaching middle age, ostracized by his freethinking parents,
since the sight of him constitutes an intolerable reminder-has sunk to
the bottom of society. That is, he has become a newspaperman, is
divorced from his wife, lives in furnished rooms, with only a dog and
a fellow newspaperman for companions ; when the play opens, he is
being treated by a psychiatrist. The treatment is not progressing because
the traumatic event in the potting shed has been sheared out of his
memory-censored by the rationalist super-ego. As the curtain rises, the
old rationalist, now superannuated (his books no longer sell ) , is dying;
the black sheep appears in the family living room, carrying his faithful
dog's leash; his mother fiercely bars him from the deathbed, while
refusing to give a reason. Shortly after this, driven back to his rooms
in Nottingham, he decides to attempt suicide.
It is a saturnine conception, based on a simple reversal. Something
good-a miracle or seeming miracle-is treated as though it were some–
thing bad. The rationalist family expels belief from its midst, as a pious
family would expel unbelief. The shoe is on the other foot, but it still
pinches. Expediency is shown to have played its customary part. The
old rationalist suppresses the miracle because he has a proprietary in-
