New Play in Manhattan

Promise (by Henry Bernstein; Gilbert Miller, producer). In 1907 Henry Bernstein's first Broadway production, The Thief, featured the late Kyrle Bellew, ran for nine months. His Melo, presented in 1931, gave Basil Rathbone two months' employment. Never the author of a distinguished play, Henry Bernstein in his native France is nevertheless a distinguished playwright, an able literary psychologist, a sensitive observer, a careful craftsman. It takes a little something more, however, to make a good play, and that, unanimously decided Manhattan reviewers, is what Promise has not got.

What this formless interlude in French upper-middle-class family life has got is a characteristic, plush-lined Gilbert Miller production and a fine cast of actors. Chief among them is Sir Cedric Hardwicke, never before seen on a U. S. stage. An exponent of the feather-touch, as the timid, pale grey little Parisian father, his gentle intonations and delicate gestures seem to indicate that he is afraid that grosser activity might jar him loose from the stage and send him floating up in the flies. In direct contrast to Sir Cedric's placidity is Irene Browne's portrayal of Mme Delbar, his violent, redheaded wife.

She hates her husband for his feebleness, his lack of health and spirit. In the end each has full revenge on the other from the ignominy of their mutual pity.

Promise is punctuated by no dramatic conflict between the principals more exciting than their opposite attitudes toward a mild young man who switches his betrothal from their handsome, animal-spirited daughter to the mother's daughter by a former marriage, a finer girl whose beauty is inward. Deep-reading observers may be able to construe these two as symbols of their mother's condition, and the play as a subtle French study of the menopause. The U. S. translation does not articulate this idea, however, and when the final curtain falls with Miss Browne sobbing in a chair and Sir Cedric wandering vaguely off the set, spectators cannot tell for sure if the play or just the act is over.

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