STAGE

...There are two noteworthy exceptions, and they are the two sharpest characterizations I have found in Betti's theater...

...Too little of the work of Eduardo de Filippo, Paolo Levi, Luigi Chiarelli, Giovacchino Forzano, Roberto Bracco, Silvio Giovaninetti, Mario Fratti, and other modems has been published in English to permit useful comparisons...

...It is a decision- making mechanism...

...The prostitute pretender, Argia, the play's real heroine, turns into a wearying creature who mouths high principles...

...It has become a commonplace of dramatic criticism to measure an author by attending to the "significance" and "seriousness" of his themes, rather than to the inventiveness of his plotting, dialogue and characterization...

...later they will pay for them...

...Its command is straight fundamentalism: Only believe...

...His dialogue in The Queen and the Rebels inevitably contains Britishisms, but these could be lifted out or modified easily enough...

...or And...

...This quotation comes from a volume entitled Ugo Betti: Three Plays on Justice (Landslide, Struggle Till Dawn, and The Fugitive...

...His judge pleads at the end for understanding of all the people involved, or perhaps "something higher: compassion...

...Reed's and McWilliam's translations are acceptably polished...

...Not untypically, Betti refuses to assign the blame...

...Others may, as I do, look for a character here and there who-ducks away from general truths or puts an impudent, selfish slant on them, somebody like Wedekind's Marquess of Keith when he says, "Anybody can undergo misfortune...

...These and other of his plays have also stolen into drama anthologies where Betti, who died in 1953 at the age of 61, is usually named "the greatest Italian playwright since Pirandello...

...Betti's metaphysical pretensions may be high, but his level of speculation is low, at times childish...

...one must only be brave enough to take it...

...Nearly all of them heave up an unrevealed act of dishonesty, bad faith, or criminal negligence from their past...

...The Queen and the Rebels (1949) also narrows down to a trial...

...Betti's last play The Fugitive (1953) is a trial on a different level, in which a man who will not abandon his sinning wife is pursued up a mountain by the forces of good and evil...

...it takes skill to know how to profit from it...

...And in a play about a phony queen, the Argia would very likely not have died like a queen but lived like a tart...

...they are being set up for a fall...

...Evergreen, 283 pp., $2.45), Reed writes: "It is probable that most critics in Italy today regard him as a greater dramatic artist than Pirandello.' McWilliam feels that "it is our duty to place him firmly where he belongs, in the company of the major dramatists of the present century...

...I cannot help thinking that if any of these playwrights had written about corruption in a palace of justice, at least one character would have made an almost watertight case for corruption, thereby giving it a threatening presence and not merely a name...

...Betti's work already sits under enough handicaps without gawky English...

...In much the same way McWilliam, paraphrasing Betti's own essay "Religion and the Theater," tells us that he "never loses sight of his main purpose, which is to offer a convincing and poetic presentation of man's instinctive search for true justice...

...Actually, "credit" is hardly the word...

...The most admirable quality in Betti is his craftsmanship in constructton.He could put together a narrative suspensefully, even though the suspense is jeopardized continually by the naivete of the characters and by such old-fashioned devices as having a monologue interrupted and intensified by Yes...

...And the actual Queen in The Queen and the Rebels, a shivering, sweating, hunted wretch played with wistful candor in the Theater Four production by Clarice Blackburn, is a superb personification of Fearfulness...

...But what playwright isn't...

...Shaw had that in supreme allotment, so did Brecht, and so does Sartre...

...No doubt people are hard at work right now reinterpreting Lenormand or Marcel and putting a new gloss on Anouilh, Williams and Albee to prove that they are not only popular but important...

...She plays her part too convincingly, and is executed...

...But she dies like a queen...

...Only two of his plays, The Gambler and Crime on Goat Island, came into New York during the '50s, but last year Corruption in the Palace of Justice appeared off Broadway and this year The Queen and the Rebels had a brief season at Theater Four, after a number of productions around the country...

...Reed is a poet and radio-playwright whose Naming of Parts and Judging Distances are among the best vernacular poems to have come out of England since before the last War...

...When Betti's weaker characters do utter ignoble sentiments they seem incapable of defending them...

...If they shall, how...

...The plays conclude with an impulse of generosity or renunciation, and the author points to the slim opportunity for redemption...

...Angelo, the wandering Lothario in Crime on Goat Island, battens on a dead friend's wife, sister and daughter, seduces all three of them, and ends up, unrepentant, at the bottom of a well...

...A play consists in one sense of the weighing of the characters on one another's scales and, at the same time, on the scales of the author...

...But one really has to go back to Ibsen before finding a dramatist of comparable heroic stamp.' These estimates, the first taking cover behind "most critics in Italy today," strike me as bosh...

...In his introduction to Three Plays by Ugo Betti (The Queen and the Rebels, The Burnt Flower-Bed, and Summertime...

...Sustained seriousness is right...

...The very idea of conflict presupposes justice...

...In Corruption in the Palace of Justice (1944), six judges are accused of harboring "somewhere a red pustule of leprosy: corruption...

...In a makeshift court conducted by a revolutionary government a prostitute pretends to be the former queen of an unnamed country...

...And the soul, such as it is, does not seem like a very complicated phenomenon to him...

...Chandler, 183 pp., $2.95...

...It constrains its owner, landlord, or what you will to have faith (or not to), to- be good (or not to...

...Is the builder the culprit, or his workmen, or a mysterious capitalist who owns most of the city in question...

...His most common resolution is to sacrifice one character and absolve everybody...

...In the later plays, this becomes more explicitly a search for a higher, divine justice, and the evolution of the Bettian hero is toward a figure tenaciously searching for God in a world which has lost its faith...

...Directors, even sound ones like Shyre-and his organization of the play was otherwise taut, thanks to a well-chosen cast--ought to leave the art of translation to qualified people...

...Betti is continually asking whether his characters are to be considered culpable for their hidden "crimes...

...This unattributed version drops such tongue-twisters as, "I'm unfortunately obligated to contaminate my speech with foreign phrases.' If Paul Shyre, the director, disliked Reed's translation he could have used the clean and unobtrusively lyrical adaptation by Gilbert Pearlman, staged several years ago at the Bucks County Playhouse...

...One of the judges finally admits to being the source of corruption as he is dying, but we are given to understand that the other five had good reason for feeling guilty during the inquiry...

...He simply lacks the gift of dialectic...

...Betti tries resolutely to define what he calls the "bewildering incongruity between our existence and what it ought to be according to the aspirations of our soul.' But he gives us too much soul and not enough existence to point up the contrast...

...and we, the grudging participants, are meant to suffer an answering guilt for our own dark personal histories...

...McWilliam writes that Betti's dramatic career "has no equal in the modern European theater for sustained seriousness of purpose and brilliance of execution...

...Henry Reed and G. H. McWilliam, Betti's leading English translators and apostles, push him even farther-right into the front rank...

...For this reason I was surprised to notice that the production at Theater Four gave no translator's credit in the program...

...Even when his plays do not directly incorporate a trial (as in Summertime, a comedy, and Crime on Goat Island, his best because least moral drama), Betti's characters crave to be judged...

...Those who go to a dramatist as they do to their druggist for painless relief may draw pleasure from the yards and yards of confessional material and righteous advice that pour out of Betti's characters in the closing scenes...

...Such a statement is difficult to challenge, particularly since I do not read Italian well, yet I am compelled to ask: Who else is there...

...Once a "philosophical" attitude (hope or despair or unlimited brotherhood) is detected in his theater his reputation soars, and the critic in question collects giddy compliments for having made the discovery...

...His methods and settings are frequently indebted to Ibsen's-the mountainside scenes of The Fugitive are immediately reminiscent of When We Dead Awaken-but Betti seems vague at those points where Ibsen would have been precise...

...Once again, nobodyand everybody-is to blame...

...I suspect that Shyre mocked-up his own adaptation...

...or Then what...

...And when Betti was writing 60 to 70 years later, Ibsen's techniques had long passed into- common property...

...Betti was a magistrate as well as a play wright,so it is tempting to conclude that he is heavily concerned with justice, both legal and moral...

...If so, shall they be punished...

...Compassion...

...In Landslide (1932), for example, a judge has to trace the responsibility for a disaster on a building site...

...or Go on...

...It would be more accurate to say that Betti made his preoccupation with the law evident by casting many of his plays in the form of trials...

...he has previously worked over some of Sean O'Casey's autobiographies for the stage...