New Plays in Manhattan

Shadow and Substance (by Paul Vincent Carroll; produced by Eddie Dowling). Last season Eddie Dowling's production of Shakespeare's King Richard II, with Maurice Evans, attracted big business and critical bravos. Last week he did it again, this time with a modern Irish religious play, first given a year ago in Dublin's famed Abbey Theatre.

Producer Dowling has bolstered the play's shadowy situations with the best actors he could hire on either side of the Atlantic. Forty-four-year-old Sir Cedric Hardwicke (youngest actor ever knighted) plays the witty Canon Skerritt, who glories in the forms of Catholicism, finds comfort in its intellectual discipline as he sips his old Madeira, calls his parishioners boobs, but achieves a state of grace through the faith of his kitchen slavey.

Actress Julie Haydon plays radiantly as the simple-hearted slavey, makes the Canon's conversion entirely credible. Chief among the excellent supporting cast is Sara Allgood. Her plump, pious spinster was so richly comic that first-nighters chortled at her every gesture.

While Shadow and Substance is too measured, too lacking in poetic vitality to rank with the best dramas of J. M. Synge and Sean O'Casey, it is likely to be a permanent addition to Irish literature, is surely as good a play as Broadway will see this year.

Bachelor Born (by Ian Hay; produced by Milton Shubert in association with Ruth Selwyn). Since the recent razzing in London of You Can't Take It With You (last year's Pulitzer Prize comedy), and the lukewarm reception of several English comedies in Manhattan, drama authorities have been cogitating once again the old question: What is the difference between English and American humor? British fun, according to British Authorities J. B. Priestley and Charles Morgan, is more subdued; Yankee fun is more roistering. By all the rules, Bachelor Born, which was a hit in London (under the title The Housemaster), should have displeased last week's Manhattan audiences. It should also have been subdued. But it did please the audiences, and it was not subdued.

Like Mr. Chips, old Charlie Donkin (Frederick Leister) is a housemaster at an English boarding school, adored by the boys for his crusty wisdom. Suddenly three frolicsome girls with their aunt come to live with him, turn everything arsy-versy. The high jinks soar highest when the three little minxes throw a midnight spread in their bedroom and ask a few of the boys to drop in. Right in the midst of their lark who should appear but old Donkin himself, mad as a hornet.

But so beloved is Donkin that when the hateful new headmaster tries to oust him, the young folks start a B. U. D. C. (Back Up Donkin Club). Things get pretty tense. The headmaster abolishes the school regatta, and Donkin packs up to leave. Only in the nick of time is he reinstated, and the oldest minx marries the shy music instructor, Philip ("Poop"), who calls his baby grand piano "B. G." For the final curtain Donkin stands alone in his study listening to the boys ("Old Crump," "Bimbo," "Flossie," and their pals) singing Auld Lang Syne.

A majority of witnesses found all this "charming," "irresistible," reported that the acting was excellent.

Journeyman (adapted by Alfred Hayes and Leon Alexander from the novel by Erskine Caldwell; produced by Sam Byrd). The last novel by Erskine Caldwell to be cured for the stage was Tobacco Road, now in its fifth year. His Journeyman, even though he helped direct it, will become no such theatrical Oldest Inhabitant. The story of Semon Dye (Will Geer), a rambunctious, fleshly mountebank of a traveling preacher who turns Rocky Comfort, Ga. on its ear, Journeyman'-:, gallimaufry of humors lacks bounce, its madness lacks method, its plot lacks plot. Most of the time Dye struts lungingly across the stage bellowing who he is--a helpful move for latecomers who can't read their programs in the dark, but rather trying on those who are punctual. The play slowly creeps to its big scene--a revival meeting where Rocky Comfort gets religion and writhes on the floor like so many small boys trying to get as dirty as possible rolling in the mud.

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