Stage

...There are directors who distrust the plays they deal with, who hope to make difficult work palatable by scrambling for conventional theatricality...

...A group of travelers have been stopped near the border of an unnamed country where the revolutionary leaders hope to discover the fleeing queen, who is dangerous as a symbol rather than a person...

...Even the more theatrical Pirandello, the Italian playwright with whom Betti is most often compared, has found the going difficult in the United States...

...Hussein has decided that there is a real revolution afoot in The Queen and the Rebels and, noticing that Betti's script calls for peasants, soldiers, and other supernumeraries who perform technical services (open doors, etc...

...Hussein provides her with a larger audience, two other women who mime outrageously and obscure both the speech and the queen's reaction to it, and then he sends in a soldier, breaking the rhythm and the meaning of the speech, to take the intruding women off stage so that Argia and the queen can play their first encounter as Betti wrote it...

...It makes a useful background for the protagonist's discovery of her own culpability in her demeaning life...

...It is a scene that establishes the connection between Argia and the queen and emphasizes the quality of mind in Argia that lets her move from self-awareness at this simple level to her final act of self-assertion...

...Hussein's invention here - unfortunately typical - is so foolish, so obtuse, so destructive that it is a wonder that Betti survives at all...

...The central dramatic action of his most ambitious plays usually involves a protagonist's pained recognition of his or her identity and an acceptance or an embracing of the actions that are a consequence of that self-discovery...

...That he does is a compliment to Colleen Dewhurst's playing of Argia...

...GERALD WEALES...

...In some ways the most difficult character in the play, Amos is a rational voice atop a cauldron of anger and envy, and Goetz never quite finds the man partly because he is a robbed of a key speech about the humiliations he has suffered and because he is saddled with unlikely melodramatic touches as though he were the very model of a villainous stage interrogator...

...Primarily a television director, with years of service at the BBC, where classics are regularly reshaped to fit the medium (and which, thirty years ago, commissioned Henry Reed's translation of Queen), Hussein seems to have asked himself how he could make Ugo Betti acceptable to American audiences and come up with solutions that almost - but not quite - finish Betti off in the process...

...In the first act, Argia has an important speech about the humiliation of women by men which she delivers to the peasant woman (the real queen) while applying cold cream...

...Argia, Dewhurst, Ugo Betti go out with head high...

...Wans Hussein may wish to be numbered among the first group, but his handling of The Queen and the Rebels places him firmly in the third...

...I would still like to see them done as I have imagined them, but Colleen Dewhurst's powerful reading shows us again that a good play can embody alternate truths...

...Although Corruption in the Palace of Justice had a respectable run off-Broadway in 1963, Ugo Betti has never found a place on the American stage...

...It is and it should be off stage, reflected only in the talk...

...Yet, the character's interior struggle takes place in a sea of talk in which the other figures are being forced into new conclusions about themselves and in which the protagonist's journey can be seen in the shifting pattern of ideational assertions (or disguises...

...In a long night of conversation, accusation, interrogation, Argia, a whore with a taste for play-acting, assumes the role of queen and finally, recognizing that her choice frees her from the impositions of others, dies as the queen she pretends to be...

...A single unfortunate example...

...Stage TRIUMPH OF THE WORD BETTI ON BROADWAY THERE ARE directors - a noble breed - who put their imaginations to the service of the play they are staging, use their skills to illuminate, to enrich the playwright's work...

...One of Betti's recurrent themes, here and in other plays like The Burnt Flower-Bed, is that revolution, however real the indignities that bring it on, is simply a substitution of one authority for another...

...Since Betti's anguished discussions usually take place in implicitly melodramatic surroundings, the plays may seem to promise action that is never delivered, but the words are the action and the power of the plays lies in what all those words finally reveal...

...She is helped by Betty Miller's queen when they are allowed to play a scene without interruption and to a lesser extent by Peter Michael Goetz's Commissar Amos...

...The Queen and the Rebels is very much in that Betti style...

...Betti is very much in the European tradition of philosophical drama...

...There are directors with so strong a sense of their own aesthetic personalities that they impose themselves on any dramatist who crosses their path...

...The other characters - the commissar who is Argia's chief antagonist, the real queen, Argia's selfish lover, the dying general, even minor figures like the porter and the engineer - are victims of oppression, within and outside themselves, and they serve as unhappy contrasts to the Argia who finally finds her way to an oddly fulfilling death...

...or act simply as decoration, he brings the rebellion before our eyes and ears, fills the theater with the noise of gunfire and a helicopter and the stage with soldiers whose unnecessary business distracts from the real action of the scene...

...She holds on to the developing line of this speech as she does to the whole character and works her way past Hussein's intruders to show us that the many faces of Argia belong to one woman...

...Argia's final speeches in the play, when the words and the speaker have come together at last, are a kind of triumph and I have always thought they should be played that way...

...American audiences are not supposed to bear up under long speeches, although they seem able to listen to characters talk at length if they rather than someone on stage is being addressed (v., the success of Amadeus), and are supposed to prefer action to words...

...She reads those last speeches as though she were still, painfully, working her way to the final exit, with the fear of death entwined with her courage, and only at the very end is her victory clear to her and us...