Grim Drama, Great Acting in "Therese"
Grim Drama, Great Acting in "Therese" LOVE DRIVIS TO DOOM THERESE." By Themas Jot,. Prom "Therese Raquin," by Emil* Zola. Staged by Margaret Web-tter. Setting and coetnmee by Haymond Sorry....
...Marianne Stewart makes the Captain's daughter an agreeable lass — though too sharply contrasted In her frail and rebellious aspects...
...It is the crime, and the face of the dead man, that comes between them, that forces their self-betrayal...
...Eva Le Gallienne brings more sense of suppressed emotion than uaual to her always intelligent playing, and makes Therese a richly realized figure...
...The two best bits of the evening (like "All the world's a stage" and "the seven degrees of a lie" in Shakespeare's "As You Like It") have no connection with the plot...
...The second, which calls for even subtler performance, while Emmie is watting for the policeman to come carry Hadrian off, is the Captain's picture of the fox outside, making its choice meal on Emmie's chickens...
...The expectation of competency with which we came to the Booth Theatre last Tuesday was confirmed as the curtain rose: the very set showed more than a rou-j tine consideration...
...fierce joy as the erstwhile lovers quarrel...
...and final triumph, speak eloquently from those gleaming orbs...
...But Dame May Whitty, as Madame Raquin, shows truly what a great actress ran do...
...Gwenn struts the stage as a retired sea captain—he's lost his papers because his ship has sunk.— who is alternately roaring (fortified with drink) and slily scheming against his old maid sister, Emmie...
...Naturalism, opening the closets of the mind, breaks the doors into the cellars and sub-cellars of the human spirit...
...Even when Therese and Laurent have killed the husband, all others continue innocent: Therese's mother-in-law herself urges the two to marry...
...and Montgomery Clift plays with both restraint and vigor as Hadrian...
...Emmie has pressed the Captain's daughter into a fear of contact with life...
...More imaginative directing could have done a deal...
...The fact that Lynn Riggs and Tennessee Williams both rose from the so-called "little theatre" is not all that makes us wonder (as Lilacs into "Oklahoma") whether D. H. Lawrence's story and the present play will next season blossom as a musical...
...Victor Jory as the artist-lover plays with controlled intensity...
...As the actors I move along, we are caught in the current at their concerns, until the arrival of Edmund Gwenn sweeps ns at once into the best performance and the breeziest figure of the new season...
...At the Biltmore Theatre...
...still it is their .on science that leads them to their doom...
...In an admirably apt setting, garish and tawdry, the living-room over a poor Parisian millinery shop, we watch these middle class foik...
...Margaret Webster, praised for her Shakespearean directing, is at her liest with more realistic plays...
...The basic plot is simple and sordid: a wife and her lover kill the husband...
...Hadrian and the Captain wake her back to the world...
...Preeented by Victor Payne-Jennings and Bernard Klainant...
...J. T. S. JOSEPH HEIDT RETURNS TO 7HE4TRE GUILD Joseph Heidt, recently discharged from the Army Air Forr s, has resumed his duties as general press representative for the Theatre Guild...
...but it is then that there begins the drama of their souls...
...but the one character the authors have brought to life is the rowdy Captain, whose untamed rouse is given fullest scope by Edmund Gwenn...
...for, during the time she is paralyzed, her eyes are like glowing coals: hatred, determination...
...For in truth Emmie, the village spinster that would shape all others ? in her repressed image, is a stock figure...
...Thenre it can plumb only to hell...
...The play is Shakept-arean, rather than contemporary, in its growth...
...S. TOUCHED US ALL "YOU TOUCHED ME...
...Suggested by a story of D. H. Ijawrence...
...The naturalism of Zola is transmuted into a naturalness of presentation, in the relentness drive of love to doom of Thomas Job's "Therese...
...Set by Motley...
...but the pare gathers speed again toward the implacable end, and helps make "Therese" a grim but powerful play...
...her wistful vicar, a caricature...
...Presented by Cut hue McClintic in association vrith Lee Shubert, At the Booth Theatre...
...We are quite ready to see the Captain triumph...
...In the meantime, "Ton Touched Me'' makes the first fair start of the new season...
...and that is where this wife and her lover are issiven...
...she shrinks especially from Hadrian, unadopted protege of, the Captain, now returned on leave, an air corps lieutenant in the war...
...The caricature quality of the persons, the long speeches and lack of action, the essentially trite story, might shape through song and dance into a richer evening...
...Staged by Guthrie McClintic...
...Catherine Willard gives an excellent performance as the poisonous Emmie...
...When Madame Raquin learns of their guilt, she has a stroke, is paralysed...
...For Emmie is pressing upon the Captain the dull respectability of a little English town, where even the war is viewed as a vulgar intrusion, and where Emmie's highest hope is to share a llesbless communion of the spirit with the wispy vicar- whom the Captain calls a capon...
...The very setting —the living room overstuffed, with the knick-knacks on the whatnot, counterbalanced by the Captain's study, which reproduces his cabin on "The Lone Star"—builds into the conception of the play...
...in a number of places, especially where the changing emotions of Laurent and Therese drive them from love to hate and horror, the pare is rather that of a novel than of a drama...
...By Ten-neseee Williame and Donald Windham...
...J.T...
...here, she imparts a sense of grim ness beneath the surface, as we watch the Raquin family and their guests at innocent driving of the hours away...
...First and most uproarious in Gwenns tale of how, when shipwrecked off Nicaragua, he is wooed, enticed, seduced, by a female porpoise...
...Speeches tend to be long, occasionally touched with poetry, as in the Captain's rhapsodic memory of his lost ship, that wished the sky were ocean, to sail among the constellations to Its very edge...
Vol. 28 • October 1945 • No. 42
