106
PARTISAN REVIEW
dead-"the late lamented auld liar and lunatic, Major Cornelius Melody,
av his Majesty's Seventh Dragoons. ... He didn't bother shooting him–
self, since it'd be a mad thing to waste a bullet on a corpse!" This is
just theatrics; the part of the leering peasant is as much of a masquerade
as the part of the major. But it allows the play to stop.
A play without hero or villain has a hard time stopping or indeed
going anywhere. The equivocal character of the central figure makes
the action necessarily repetitious and irresolute, a seesaw of conflicting
motives. Nothing for these people is
final.
The only play of the current
group that definitively ends is
Deathwatch,
which is the only one with
an uncompromising moral standard: Green Eyes has stayed aloof from
the action, watching, like a
deus absconditus,
and then steps in to judge
Lefranc as though he were Justice itself. There is nothing more to
be
said.
The Osborne play, his first, written in collaboration with Anthony
Creighton, has already closed; public opinion did not like it. It was ex–
traordinarily well acted, but this passed almost unnoticed, and why not?
No one can tell the difference any more. Winsome Helen Hayes, that
brave little body, was "hailed" for a performance in the O'Neill play
that would have caused real uneasiness in a high school play; bent
back, nodding, quavering head, tottering gait, copious winks, groans,
and sly, rheumy grimaces left the impression that here was a child–
plucky thing too--play;ng the part of a hobbling crone of forty or
forty-five.
It
would be better to read the play than to be obliged to
watch her, even though Eric Portman is sometimes very striking as
Con Melody. The acting in the Genet, done by young people, is quite
passable.
Mary McCarthy
