The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Jan. 7, 1952

Legend of Lovers (adapted by Kitty Black from the French of Jean Anouilh) is provocative, but at a very high price. On a mythological foundation, Playwright Anouilh has reared a modern fantasy thick with symbolic scrollwork, ironic turrets, philosophic staircases, mystical passageways. Instead of reanimating the Orpheus & Eurydice legend with new poignancy, the play ends by crushing it to death.

At a provincial railway station, a young street musician and a young actress are instantly and passionately drawn to each other. They spend an ecstatic 24 hours in a grubby Marseille hotel until, her past catching up with her, the girl flees and is killed. The lover has the chance to regain his Eurydice in life by shunning her face till dawn. He looks too soon, but has now the chance—which he embraces—of joining her in death.

Legend of Lovers is a bewilderment of contrasts: between realistic and romantic love, cynicism and idealism, the claims of life, impermanent and impure, and those of changeless Death, to whom Anouilh grants a rather mawkish victory. The play has its merits. Amid so many varieties of love, it at least excludes Hollywood's. There are vivid counterpointings, piquant juxtapositions. Eldon Elder's set is splendidly striking; and though Dorothy McGuire seems partly mystified and partly miscast as the girl, Richard Burton, as her lover, plays a difficult role persuasively. But the play grows tedious with saucy twists and lethargic with the fumes of Nachtkultur. When it doesn't seem all too French, it seems much too German.