New Play in Manhattan

On the Rocks (by George Bernard Shaw; produced by the Federal Theatre). "Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence. But one of the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks." Taking this gloomy pronouncement by Captain Shotover in Heartbreak House as his text, Author Shaw wrote On the Rocks to while away the tedium of his world tour in 1933. Last week, its belated cut-price U. S. premiere brilliantly rounded out the Federal Theatre's season.

Current convention for producers of Shaw plays is to dress up the protagonist in whiskers to resemble George Bernard Shaw. Thus disguised, Actor Philip Bourneuf talks his way brilliantly through the heroically talky role of Sir Arthur Chavender. No drunken skipper, but a tired, shilly-shallying Prime Minister, Sir Arthur is discovered, when On the Rocks begins, fiddling aimlessly about the interior of No. 10 Downing Street while an angry mob howls in the streets outside. Halfway through Act I, he receives a visit from a mysterious Lady in Grey (Estelle Winwood) who whisks him away to a sanatorium on the ground that his ineffectiveness is caused not by too much but by too little intellectual exercise.

In Act II, Sir Arthur gives what Author Shaw apparently considers convincing evidence of a cerebral reawakening by proposing a benevolent dictatorship, including nationalization of banks, property and labor. The Prime Minister's brave proposals come to nothing, but by the time his cabinet, his constituents, a fierce young female Marxist (Ardis Gains), and his family have indicated their more or less reluctant disapproval, audiences have been treated to a symposium so full of sparkling, perfectionist common sense that they may well forget that they have seen nothing closer to physical action than a young agitator's feeble threat to break a window.

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