Old Plays in Manhattan

The Shoemakers' Holiday (by Thomas Dekker; produced by the Mercury Theatre). With his modern-dress Julius Caesar still playing to capacity audiences in its eighth week, last week Actor-Producer Orson Welles turned again to the gusty Elizabethans. Bawdier than three burlesque shows, but too disarmingly frank and deftly acted to be offensive, The Shoemakers' Holiday struck Broadway like a brisk wind. Good Queen Bess, never a prude, must have liked it too, and roared like a sailor.

Shoemakers' humor is seldom subtle, but Welles has augmented his troupe with accomplished actors who perform the thwacking horseplay in fine style. As the ruddy little Crispin who becomes Lord Mayor of London, Whitford Kane personifies all the industry, sanity and lustiness of a jolly beefeater. Marian Warring-Manley as his good wife, Margery, waddles it like all the Wives of Bath and Mistress Quicklys who have dedicated their big bosoms and broad buttocks to England's earthy spirit.

Shoemakers' plots are mightily involved even though the play has been cut to about half its length. One thread of plot entangles Rowland Lacy (Joseph Gotten) who, instead of going to war in France, disguises himself as a journeyman in order to woo his lady. Other plotters are Vincent Price and Edith Barrett, whose contributions to the high cockalorum are good, but occasionally strained. The real heroes are the shoemakers themselves, and the best of these jackanapes in droopy drawers and flapping codpieces is Hiram Sherman. His finegrained playing of low comedy won him a first-night ovation.

In key with the rustic humors of the play (and with the Mercury Theatre's economical practice), the stage setting is built of unfinished boards against a backdrop of homespun. Without any intermission, the action overflows between three small inner stages and out into the audience on the forestage. The Shoemakers' Holiday looks and sounds like spontaneous revelry, but it represents the hard work of a talented new group whose ambitions are neither political nor esthetic but, in the word's best sense, theatrical.

A Doll's House (by Henrik Ibsen, new acting version by Thornton Wilder; produced by Jed Harris). Of late years Ibsen's famed Doll's House has been gathering dust in the theatre's attic. But shrewd Producer Jed Harris thought that all the old play needed was a thorough dusting. As house cleaner he got Author Thornton Wilder, whose used his broom with a will, beat all the grimy old-fashionedness out of the dialogue, threw 15 unnecessary minutes right out the window. Producer Harris opened his refurbished Doll's House at last summer's Drama Festival in Central City. Colo., later took it on tour. By last week's Manhattan opening Jed Harris could be sure that A Doll's House, with the help of four star actors, was once again a four-star hit.

No. i star was Comedienne Ruth Gordon, who made a great success last season in Wycherley's scandalous Country Wife. She plays Nora in .4 Doll's House as a childlike, skipping chucklehead, a unique individual rather than the social type Ibsen meant her to symbolize, thus helps transform the play from an outmoded indictment into a moving character study. As Nora's complacent spouse, Dennis King, hero of operettas, farces and romantic dramas, plays Ibsen as well as he sings Lehar and Friml. For all of Torvald's prissy traits, Actor King makes him pitiable in his final, bewildered defeat. Back from playing the ancient High Lama in Hollywood's Lost Horizon, Sam Jaffe is expertly repulsive and yet appealing as Nils Krogstad, the blackmailer who gets Nora in his clutches. Also from Hollywood, Paul Lukas acts with restraint and beauty the doomed Doctor Rank who faces his own death with tragic calm.

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