The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Nov. 29, 1954

The Living Room (by Graham Greene) has, at worst, a very real value in the current theater: it brings darkness to light places. In this grim drama, which emerges as a kind of distinguished failure, Graham Greene begins where most of the successes leave off. Amid all its spiritual confusions, there is no touch of compromise, and though it clearly goes downhill, it never once turns off its own steeply rocky road.

The play concerns a young Roman Catholic girl who has become the mistress of a middle-aged married psychologist. She is deeply in love with him when, after her mother's death, she goes to live in a sort of religious Bleak House with two devout great-aunts and a paralyzed priest of a great-uncle. Her relatives exist in cramped fright, having sealed off—in their retreat from reality—room after room in which anyone has died. A wily, bigoted aunt first keeps the girl from running away with her lover. Then she forces the girl to confront her lover's neurotic wife and to grasp that beyond her own Catholic problem of sin, her lover is still bound by strong conjugal ties. When the girl turns imploringly to her great-uncle in his wheelchair, he tries—but in vain—to offer something more than mere platitudes and catchwords of faith; and the suffering girl commits suicide.

Greene has treated a common enough triangle story in religious rather than sociological—or even psychological—terms. The eye of God rather than of neighborhood gossips is upon it, and the problem is not only of the conscience but of the soul. This vast and difficult theme haunts its Catholic-convert playwright without for a moment ever easing his heart. Blinkered Catholicism and clear-eyed rationalism he alike denounces; indeed, beyond a blindly clutched and tormenting faith, Greene's spiritual cupboard seems bare. His well-meaning priest remarks that he has never read Paradise Lost—whose author also, as it happens, tried to "justify the ways of God to men." Certainly Greene's priest cannot justify them; he can only insist that they are somehow just. Greene's Jansenist mind—again in Milton's words—"can make a Hell of Heaven"; his stricken world suggests his fellow Catholic Francis Thompson's:

For we are born in other's pain, And perish in our own.

But it is not the play's forbidding tone or gloomy subject matter that makes it, after an impressive first half, so palpably decline. It is, rather, its compulsion to prolong the agony without knowing how to dramatize it. The fine craftsman and melodramatist who wrote Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory, the novelist who much more deftly approached the theme of The Living Room in The Heart of the Matter, has, in his first play, allowed his anxious emotions to overwhelm him. The Living Room too much batters its theme before the suicide, and again for a whole scene after it. Nor is the production very helpful. Walter Fitzgerald and Michael Goodliffe are good as the priest and the psychologist, but Greene's cold overwroughtness is played up rather than down; and Barbara Bel Geddes. though a charming actress, lacks the right inner simplicity and bewilderment for the heroine.