New Plays in Manhattan

The Shining Hour (by Keith Winter; Max Gordon, producer). The first act of The Shining Hour is devoted to limning the Linden family, genteel Yorkshire farmers. The Lindens are excited by foxes, foals, jigsaw puzzles. They live in such smothering juxtaposition that any disturbance is likely to upset the whole family.

The disturbance is cool, assured Mariella (Gladys Cooper) who has married one of the brothers. She responds with rudeness to the spinster sister's rudeness, with love to the love of David (Raymond Massey), the eldest brother. Mariella's husband is smug and blind, but David's wife Judy (Adrianne Allen) sees clearly. Because she likes Mariella, because she loves David and is grateful to him for marrying her, Judy steps under the falling side of a burning barn. Almost mad with resentment, grief and frustration, David strikes crashing discords on the piano, breaks plates. It is Mariella who persuades him that Judy intended her sacrifice to remove, not to create, a barrier.

Impeccably written, The Shining Hour is shored up by the intricately modulated performance of patrician Gladys Cooper and the able assistance of Adrianne Allen. Daughter of a journalist, wife of a publisher (Sir Neville Pearson), conspicuous on the British stage for 20 years before last week's U. S. debut, Gladys Cooper manages London's Playhouse Theatre, has three children.

Queer People (by John Floyd; Galen Bogue, producer) has a queer history. Four years ago, Carroll and Garrett Graham, brothers who had worked on Los Angeles newspapers and in Hollywood studios, wrote the book from which the play was adapted. As a novel, Queer People seemed to Will Hays so raw that he forbade Producer Howard Hughes to turn it into cinema. The publicity which the incident gave the book helped Galen Bogue last week to bill Hal Skelly "in the lovable and immortal role of 'Whitey.' "

Theodore Anthony White was, like most of the book's other characters, supposed to have a living prototype. He is a drunken lustful newshawk, with good intentions and a kind hearted mistress (Gladys George). In the course of his Hollywood career, Whitey becomes successively a press agent, a cinema director, a "professor" in a sporting house, a studio executive. His erratic success story, outlined against the demented pageant of Hollywood business and social idiocies, ends when a director is murdered by the girl Whitey idolizes and Whitey's mistress is rewarded with possibilities of matrimony for saving him in court.

If John Floyd had tried less arduously to include all the queer people in the Graham book and treated them as incidental to his main theme, his play might have made more sense. As it is, Whitey seems less than an immortal hero but Hal Skelly's teetering performance gives the play what vitality it has. Its fundamental defect is that libeling Hollywood has long since ceased to be sufficient grounds for drama.

Richard of Bordeaux (by Gordon Daviot; William Mollison, producer). Richard II of England was an unhappy monarch. He ascended the throne at the age of ten. His uncles, the Dukes of Lancaster, York and Gloucester, were his regents. By 1385, when this play opens, Richard was in serious trouble. His uncles disapproved his pacifist foreign policies. They beheaded for treason all his amiable friends except the Earl of Oxford, who proved himself a coward at Radcote Bridge in the civil war then raging. All this was enough to embitter a more powerful character than Richard. When his Queen Anne died of the plague, he set out for revenge, executed most of his enemies, made the mistake of letting Lancaster's son, Henry Derby, off with exile. When Derby, summoned back to England by the Archbishop of Canterbury, won the battle of Radcote, Richard went to the Tower of London, gloomily signed an abdication in favor of the rival whom he most despised.

Richard of Bordeaux investigates these medieval ups & downs with the proper air of heroic circumspection and a clanking of armor unequaled on the Manhattan stage since John Barrymore last appeared in Richard III. Dennis King (Richard) is surrounded by a cast of seasoned costume-play actors who can cry "My Lord," with real authority.

Gordon Daviot, whose name is Agnes MacIntosh, is an Inverness novelist. She spent seven years gathering material for Richard of Bordeaux. When William Mollison produced it in London it became one of last year's biggest hits. She writes with grace, simplicity and reverence for the fact, but lacks the crackle and fire that Maxwell Anderson worked into the Theatre Guild's current Mary of Scotland.

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