The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, may 9, 1955

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The Honeys (by Roald Dahl) tells of despotic, irascible twin brothers (both played by Hume Cronyn) married to pleasant, long-suffering wives. It then tells how the wives (Jessica Tandy and Dorothy Stickney) decide that it would greatly improve matters if they disposed of their husbands. Disposing of them requires a stalled elevator, tainted oyster juice, a skull-bopping with a frozen leg of lamb, and a medicinal drink containing tiger's whiskers; but the ladies are very happily widowed at the end.

A reasonably macabre farce, which can't help bringing Arsenic and Old Lace to mind, The Honeys has its fine wacky moments and amusing passages—whether bright remarks, clever pantomime, comic props, a funny murder scene, skillful acting or Ben Edwards' sets. If, for all that, there are a good many lulls, it is perhaps because the play is happier in its details than in its fundamental design. The Honeys is fairly safe playing murder for laughs because its victims are so loathsome. But Arsenic and Old Lace could play safer—and be much funnier—because its murderers were so lovable. Arsenic, again, used murder as a basis for all sorts of insane complications, where The Honeys just strings along with the idea of murder itself. What with having two corpses, The Honeys may not quite put all its eggs in one casket, but corpse-making is far too much on the agenda. When people aren't actually attempting murder, they are making good, bad and indifferent jokes about it. The play, at its best, is very entertaining. But even death can cease to seem hilarious after a while.