On Stage
LEWIS, ROBERT
ON STAGE The Quality of Imports By Robert Lewis There are certain risks involved in transplanting theater from one cultural soil to another. The adapter of a foreign play must convey the...
...Here, the theater-goer seems to be more impressed by the play's ironic contention that if you invite a pathetic rodent into your house (heart, country) even out of good motives, you may soon find him gnawing away at your vitals...
...In A Shot in the Dark (at the Booth), Harry Kurnitz has taken a Parisian success (L'Idiote by Marcel Achard) and turned it into an American hit with an American cast headed by Julie Harris and Walter Matthau and guided by an American director, Harold Clurman...
...Robert Lewis directed Brigadoon, Regina and, most recently, Kwamina...
...His staging, in Motley's stylish setting, is inventive, and the acting excellent...
...In contrast, The Caretaker by Harold Pinter (at the Lyceum), seems to have crossed the ocean intact...
...And it is difficult to find good writers for the job because it requires an expert in playwrighting who is also willing to work with another man's creation...
...Except for the decor and the characters' names, this mystery comedy might take place anywhere...
...They have not been prepared for any moral point and are disappointed at having their innocent fun taken away from them...
...The adapter of a foreign play must convey the flavor as well as the meaning of the original language...
...Even the simple matter of casting can affect an import...
...A sort of master-of-ceremonies (brilliantly played by George Rose), assuming the various guises of the "common man," reminds the audience of the sense of expediency that weakens most humans when put to a test involving true moral integrity...
...This destroyed the sense of terror that should have lurked underneath the comedy in Karl Willinger's German satire...
...When the husband cries, "We're all asking for help," Redgrave has a hard time trying to keep the customers from laughing at him...
...And Paul Scofield, with his furrowed brow and inborn sense of tragedy, added a feeling of guilt to the lover that is missed here in Richard Johnson's straight physical approach...
...It was like drawing cute expressions on the faces of Goya's Disasters of War...
...Graham Greene's The Complaisant Lover (at the Barrymore) seems funnier in New York than it did in London, but the American presentation is generally disappointing...
...In England there was greater laughter at the funny bits...
...Add the London director's (John Gielgud) awareness of the elements of pain as well as those of farce involved in Greene's marital triangle and you can see why the play now seems lighter here under Glen Byam Young's direction...
...In A Man for All Seasons (at the Anta theater) Robert Bolt, a young Manchester-born playwright, retells the story of Thomas More's refusal to approve Henry the Eighth's arbitrary decision to set himself above Church law by divorcing Katharine of Aragon...
...Without compromising history, Bolt makes the play speak directly to us...
...Noel Willman's production of the play is superb...
...Michael Redgrave plays with a lighter comic touch than I've ever seen him use, yet somehow he seems too young and virile for the deceived husband...
...A fine actor, Scofleld falls short of greatness only in the final moments...
...The Broadway production is substantially what I enjoyed in London...
...The short-lived Do You Know the Milky Way?, for example, juxtaposed the "all-American boy" personality of Hal Holbrook with the European quality of George Voskovec...
...Ralph Richardson, in the same part in London, was older, played with more obtuseness, and was therefore terribly vulnerable...
...Paul Scofield subtly seasons More's learning with wit, and his strength with gentleness...
...Anyone who has seen Berliner Ensemble's staging of Bertolt Brecht's plays under the dramatist's own direction knows how rarely his theatrical ideas are captured in foreign presentations...
...Only comic references to cuckoldry remind us of its origin...
...Retaining a play's production values presents problems, too...
...Here good acting alone cannot make up for the absence of certain values in the personal qualities of the principals...
...What has altered is the audience's response...
...The problem of local flavor was skirted by "degallicizing" the play...
...Still, it is an amusing evening, especially when Matthau, as a too-elegant husband, is on...
...But A Man for All Seasons is the perfect import for all countries at this, or any other, time...
Vol. 44 • December 1961 • No. 39
