The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Jan. 30, 1950

(2 of 3)

Yet no recent play combines so much polish with so much weight, or expresses its insights with so much of the gaiety which Stendhal demanded of healthy art. But what is most important is that The Cocktail Party is a kind of triumph of spoken drama. Its author is a master of both language and verse, and his play asks only for performance; it does not require a production full of gauze curtains, revolving stages, trick lighting and various sound effects.

There are no pyrotechnics, even, of language; the brilliance lies in the precision. Much of the verse is spoken—and strikes the ear—as prose; where the emotion or situation intensifies, the rhythm does. Yet there are echoes of Eliot's own verse and a few faintly Elizabethan ones; examples of his skill in having characters pick up one another's phrases like dropped cues; and of speeches in which a key word is repeated several times with fine effect.

Under E. Martin Browne's very careful direction, a cast brought from England speaks the play excellently and acts it well. As the specialist, Alec Guinness plays with a particular, and particularly needed, authority.

The Enchanted (adapted from the French of the late Jean Giraudoux by Maurice Valency; produced by David Lowe & Richard Davidson), whatever its weaknesses as a play, is frequently enchanting. A fantasy, as was Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot, it uses a much slighter and more tremulous fable. Instead of grandly and wackily turning Paris upside down, it delicately turns existence inside out. Half the play merely suggests and evokes, like music; even the solider half is mostly talk.

In a French provincial town suddenly everybody is happy and everything makes sense: the millionaire, for once, doesn't win the lottery or the mother superior the motorcycle. A horrified government inspector arrives to investigate such an unseemly state of affairs, discovers something worse—a pretty young schoolteacher who not only has her own whimsical version of the facts of life, but is seeking the facts of death from a ghost with whom she has romantic rendezvous. The inspector tries in vain to exorcise the ghost, who refuses to vanish until he notices the girl unconsciously responding to a flesh-&-blood suitor. Even then the girl all but dies of losing him; it requires a whole persuasive symphony of mundane attractions to woo her back to life.

All fantasy, as E. M. Forster has said, "asks us to pay something extra" by way of credence or adjustment. In addition, this particular fantasy boasts far better symbolism than it does story. But The Enchanted is saved from any allegorical pallor or patness, from any insistent contrast of illusion with reality (e.g., romantic yearnings for the moon with realistic cultivation of gardens) by its doubling back on itself and by its gay, vigilant irony. Through the inspector, Giraudoux pokes merciless fun at literal-mindedness, practical wisdom, bureaucratic palaver. Yet he knows, and expresses with the sad sparkle of his wit, that man needs feet even more than wings, and must accept reality to survive. But there is yet another turn of the wheel: man need neither flee reality nor accept it; he can deliberately transform, it, as the girl's young suitor does, squeezing undreamed-of poetry out of his highly prosaic job.