Owl of Wisdom

THE CHALK GARDEN by Enid Bagnold

If plays were dice, Manhattan's Roundabout Theater would be rolling sevens and elevens. In the past year this eclectic off-Broadway group has mounted a wryly tender A Taste of Honey, fired off an ebulliently witty Misalliance, weighed hypocrisy and humanity on the scales of The Browning Version, and now burnishes a high comedy of manners with Enid Bagnold's civilized, pitiless and elliptical The Chalk Garden.

Though it has but one monarch, England does not lack for regally imperious voices. Mrs. St. Maugham (Constance Cummings) is a dowager queen who rules a country house, or seems to. She thunders out non sequiturs in the accents of invincibility. She is half dotty, half a sage and always right. As she tells Miss Madrigal (Irene Worth), who has applied for the post of governess to her granddaughter: "Now that there are no subject races, one must be served by the mad, the sick and those who can't take their places in the outside world."

The house is well staffed with all three. Unseen on an upper floor is the dying Tinkbell, a butler before whom employers cringe, quite apart from guests. The current butler and harried man-of-all-work, Maitland (Donal Donnelly), has done five years in jail as a conscientious objector. He is a flavorsome cousin of Bernard Shaw's servants, brimming with querulous grievance.

While 14-year-old Laurel (Sallyanne Tackus), Mrs. St. Maugham's granddaughter, may not be certifiably mad, she does lead a bizarre fantasy life. She claims to have seen her father commit suicide when she was twelve, though he died of an alcoholic liver. In that same year, she insists, she was raped in Hyde Park, though this is her symbolic retaliation for her mother's remarriage. She is also a live-in pyromaniac who blithely announces: "I set fire to things."

That is why she needs a governess. As it develops, Miss Madrigal is an ex-convict, but she is an owl of wisdom. No one fully glimpses her past until a warmer-than-drawing-room-temperature confrontation in Act III with the judge (I.M. Hobson) who convicted her. Miss Madrigal, it develops, tended a garden during her 15-year sentence for murder. Under her wise ministrations the lime-based waste patch of the play's title also promises to flourish, along with the love-parched inhabitants of the manor house.

The specific gravity of Irene Worth's mode of delivery banishes frivolity and inspires conviction, as does the work of Constance Cummings and Donal Donnelly. Mrs. St. Maugham may not have been named that for nothing since The Chalk Garden measures human character with Maugham's skeptic eye.