On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
By Joseph T Shipley A Shavian Mixture Of Wit and Wisdom In Good King Charles's Golden Days. By Bernard Shaw. Staged by Day Tuttle. Sets by Charles Brandon. Costumes by Elizabeth Engrav. Presented...
...A simple set and colorful costumes establish the period, which the acting sustains...
...and the Quaker, pointing out that Newton sees space stretch toward infinity, scorns him out of the thought that God is such a niggard of time...
...Charles, who is reigning successfully over a people which executed his father, warns James (who wishes to model himself on the French monarch, Louis XIV, Le Roi Soleil) that England is a deucedly foggy country for Sun Kings...
...Only more prominent, not more accomplished, are Frank Schofield as the matter-of-fact, absent-minded-professor Newton, Felix Deebank as the debonair but alert and responsible Charles, and Sasha von Scherler as the sweet and pungent darling, Nellie Gwynn...
...For Newton has been working on a chronology of Bible history, dating the creation of the world at 4004 B.C...
...The result is In Good King Charles's Golden Days, the playwright's dizziest dazzle of mental pyrotechnics...
...There is foolery along these lines, too, as when Newton multiplies 7 and 3 by adding their logarithms...
...These men meet in the home of "Newton the alchemist," as Louise, Duchess of Portsmouth, calls him, when she conies seeking a love-potion to use on Charles...
...She finds that two others of the King's mistresses have already made irruption into the usually placid household, where Newton's prim housekeeper, less abashed by the distinguished company than aghast at their frivolity, tries at the same time to be forbidding and hospitable...
...At the Downtown Theater...
...Here we watch Charles alone with his Queen, in one of the few truly tender scenes in the Shavian repertory...
...There is no connection between this movement and the body of the play, except as the radiance of understanding complements the glow of wisdom and the sparkle of wit...
...Isaac Newton, on whom the apple fell...
...and more sober wonder, still pertinent, about the precession of the equinoxes and the perihelion of Mercury...
...The players, from Elaine Eldridge's first entrance as the housemaid to Rhodelle Heller's last look as the Queen, catch and convey the Shavian mood...
...Shaw's bright idea was to bring together, on the brink of the modern world, a statesman, a theologian, a scientist and an artist, whose ideas clash in constant showers of sparks...
...Rowley) ; George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends...
...The audience comes, as it were, to a mental buffet, stacked with roast beef and good game, savory salads, and a melange of meringues and fluffy desserts...
...The artist, pointing to the lovely Lady Barbara, laughs him into the idea that beauty and space are built upon curves...
...Newton is more provoked when Charles's brother (later James II) comes in with his sneer and his belief in the divine right of kings...
...It is less a play than what some might call a conversation piece, save that the talk is almost too brilliant for conversation and the thoughts are too provocative to leave the mind at peace...
...and the Court painter, Godfrey Kneller...
...The play, however, gradually shifts to a second field of thought, the political...
...The production is delightful...
...The year is 1680, the men Charles II (officially incognito, as Mr...
...Thus, we watch the man of intellect put in his place by men of feeling and of faith...
...At an age when most who have reached it are doddering, or content to rest, Bernard Shaw hatched a bright idea...
...Act I ends as Newton, declaring that an Englishman's home is his castle, wrestles with James to throw him down the stairs...
...The picture of Charles as an astute ruler, accepting Louis's money but using it for England's good, maintaining a peaceful rule between two revolutions, is mellowed in the Epilogue to a warmer portrait...
...Newton has also been developing his theory of gravitation to explain the deviations in nature from the basic straight line: The universe is in essence rectilinear...
...A three-ring intellectual circus, with clowns and tightrope walkers and ideas shot from guns, is on display at the Downtown Theater, bringing us the rollicking and the intellectual ferment in Good King Charles's Golden Days...
...Mutual understanding and affection warm their relationship, as we discover that there can be a harmony, a faithfulness of the spirit despite infidelities of the flesh...
...Presented by William and Elizabeth Landis...
...Out of a bright idea, as the Greek Aristophanes knew, one makes a comedy...
...the 83-year-old Irishman set about the task...
...Tha various dispositions of Louise, Barbara Castlemaine and Nell Gwynn lend color and spice to the discussion ; but it is scientist Newton whom Shaw takes for the heaviest fall, as two of his most cherished notions are toppled...
Vol. 40 • February 1957 • No. 6
