On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE A Rattigan Change-of-Pace By Joseph T. Shipley The Sleeping Prince. By Terence Rattigan. Directed by Michael Redgrave. Presented by the Producers Theater and Gilbert Miller. At the...
...Foreseeing all his maneuvers, she nevertheless capitulates ?and captivates the Regent...
...Miss Bel Geddes is ably abetted by the versatile Michael Redgrave...
...The American girl puts the bit between his teeth and tames him...
...a good thing, too, for otherwise the paste puffball quality of the play would be too glaringly revealed...
...The Regent is in London, despite riots and the threat of revolution at home...
...In the meantime, Mr...
...Four of his plays have attained over a thousand performances each in London...
...The same quiet glow, as decency moves against the pitfalls of living, illuminates the two plays of the current Rattigan Broadway hit...
...Then, by way of sharp contrast, up dances a puffball of theatrical froth, The Sleeping Prince...
...Terence Rattigan is not only a versatile but a penetrating, perspicuous and powerful playwright...
...At the Music Box...
...The two plays are centered in the lounge and dining room of a second-rate hotel in the south of England...
...He is a man who out of lonely disappointment has invented for himself a palatable past—who, moreover, has just pleaded guilty to annoying women in a movie house...
...The surprising result is the restoration of sympathy for the man and the first independent action in her life by the daughter...
...The diversity of the author is reflected in the skill of the performer...
...The acting is excellent...
...Mary goes to the royal suite at the London Legation resolved not to surrender to the Duke's blandishments...
...The manager of the hotel, herself in love with the statesman, yet helps him toward the reunion, and the doomed couple starts once more along heartbreak road...
...They are such a couple as fits the old Roman's words: "I cannot live or with you or without...
...As his wife, Cathleen Nesbitt is an amusing chatter of irrelevancies...
...In Table Number Seven, the second play, we learn that the retired major is not so exalted a creature at all...
...Margaret Leighton, the beautiful though seemingly cold model of the first play, is strangely appealing as the bewildered and beaten-down daughter of the second...
...Two plays by Terence Rattigan...
...Terence Rattigan is a playwright of varied talents...
...At the Coronet Theater...
...she has tracked her husband and come to seek a reconciliation...
...Separate Tables...
...it is a tense drama of human lives that we watch, with observations on human nature and the powers of decency and integrity welling out as a natural consequence of the action...
...Deft, delicate dancing on the tightrope of faery fancy gives the play its pleasing mood...
...Rattigan has managed another tense conflict, in which various natures are deftly counterpoised...
...She, too, has been increasingly lonely since the divorce...
...Eric Portman is also impressive in the two contrasting male roles...
...It is a tribute to the author and the actors (Redgrave as director as well) that in these grim, realistic days so much of the grace and charm of the play comes through...
...Most successful over here has been his picture of "the Winslow boy,'' victim of unjust dismissal from a Navy training school...
...Phyllis Neilson-Terry, as the rigid, self-righteous mother, is but one of the other excellent players who give a cohesiveness to Separate Tables and make these two vignettes of life in the shabby hotel significant, potent and alive...
...The horrified beldame, even more horrified to find that her daughter and the major are friendly, calls a council of the hotel guests to demand that he leave...
...She also, with her Yankee independence and frank speech, wins over the Grand Duchess and the King and, by her abounding love, brings peace again to Carpathia...
...The chief figures in the first play, Table by the Window, are a divorced man, once a promising statesman, now a rundown journalist, and his former wife, a pretty model just come from London...
...The usual old gossip is there...
...Separate Tables...
...There is the tight-lipped, conventional mother, making a frustrated old maid of her completely subjected daughter...
...To this psychological drama must be added the illuminating study of a schoolteacher in The Browning Version...
...the retired major...
...the businesslike manager...
...Presented by the Producers Theater in association with Hecht-Lancaster...
...His ideas do not become obtrusive...
...Directed by Peter Glenville...
...Separate Tables brings us right down to searching, indeed searing, reality...
...And at a London theater he picks an American chorus girl as his lady for the evening, who gives him the kiss of life...
...It is a Prince Regent who sleeps, awaiting love's wakening kiss—the Grand Duke Charles, Prince Regent of Carpathia, in 1911 before two world wars had wiped Graustark and the other lands of romance off the map of Mittel-Europa...
...Barbara Bel Geddes in the role captivates the audience...
...After many sobering Shakespearean roles, Redgrave here struts and stomps as a monocled monarch of a sentimental land...
Vol. 39 • December 1956 • No. 50
