Redcoats on Broadway
SCHNEIDER, ALAN
ON STAGE By Alan Schneider Redcoats on Broadway The battles of Broadway are increasingly being won on the playing fields of London. In recent years Actors Equity has been up in arms over...
...His ultimate choice, which is the play's, between the papers he desires passionately and the girl who needs him desperately, comes too late and stirs only the surface...
...Only the redoubtable Gladys Cooper succeeds in making the play's texture her own...
...The talented Anne Meacham, as the Englishwoman who causes all the trouble, is too patently neurotic from the start, while Eric Portman as a sympathetic civil servant seems unusually colorless...
...For this season the local stage has been engulfed by a fullscale invasion of British playwrights...
...Here, as in The Heiress, Miss Hiller's eloquent combination of fragility and strength makes her the ideal James heroine...
...But advance reconnaissance reports indicate that other big guns are on the way: John Osborne's Luther...
...The original landing force, which consisted of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, Noel Coward's Sail Away and Graham Greene's The Complaisant Lover, has suffered a 50 per cent casualty rate...
...But even her hushed premonition of disaster, "Now it begins" cannot help evoking a "What...
...Apart from Ben Edwards' authentically decadent Venetian palazzia, whatever degree of mood and inner conviction The Aspern Papers possesses—and that is considerable —is largely the result of Wendy Hiller's carefully wrought characterization of the spinster...
...Thus, not all of the smoothtongued Redcoat invaders have been first-line troops...
...Too often in both plays, what should be subtly pulsating beneath the surface of the stage action is either non-existent or blatantly obvious...
...In recent years Actors Equity has been up in arms over the steady infiltration of English actors and directors...
...and the highly touted satirical revue, Beyond the Fringe, are already scheduled for Broadway production...
...Now, presumably, the Dramatists Guild is about to man the ramparts as well...
...Oliver, a musical based on Oliver Twist...
...A highly praised Pakistani actor, Zia Mohyeddin, plays in a single key throughout and addresses everyone—friend, foe, Moslem, Hindu or Christian—in the same tone...
...The main invasion party has only arrived in recent weeks: the Old Vic (about which I intend to write in a future communique) and adaptations of two well-known novels dealing with Englishmen abroad, A Passage to India (Ambassador) and The Aspern Papers (Playhouse...
...The dramatist must demonstrate, or run the risk of merely exasperating...
...The water's depths are always there, but left unexplored...
...Francoise Rosay is effective but less modulated as a vitriolic and shrewd recluse in a wheelchair...
...Both ?. ?. Forster's classic study of East-West misunderstanding and Henry James' gently woven web of personal search and unfulfillment deal with the intangible, the inscrutable, the suspected but never quite revealed...
...Her performance is a sunlight-and-shade pattern of muted delicacy and warmth...
...And Maurice Evans never manages to seem American, nor to probe deeply enough to make us understand what is concealed beneath the decorative facade of the words he speaks so sonorously...
...What is intended to be an aura of mystery becomes simply confusion...
...Novelists such as James and Forster suggest, evoke, tantalize...
...Their dramatizations, by Santha Rama Rau and Michael Redgrave, respectively, are faithfully—and, in the latter case, exquisitely—done...
...It grows into radiance and then subtly fades, like the flower she holds in her hands, as her wisp of new-found love escapes her...
...But the bridgehead was soon reinforced with Write Me a Murder, a typical, stifflipped Agatha Christie murder mystery, and Terence Rattigan's Ross, an atypical, non-murder mystery concerning the secret life and weakness of Lawrence of Arabia...
...or "It better...
...The productions are partially responsible, particularly in A Passage to India where the staging tends to be awkward and the performances curiously uneven...
...Yet both suffer from the difficulty, if not impossibility, of rendering certain fictional elements clearly in stage terms...
Vol. 45 • March 1962 • No. 5
