Flushing-on-Avon

At the New York World's Fair, as a part of a Merrie England folderol, the Bard of Avon is played inside a replica of the famed Elizabethan Globe Theatre. Thanks to Director Margaret Webster, the Old Globe's Shakespeare is neither skittish nor stodgy. Four Shakespeare comedies--As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew--have been shrunk to a quarter their usual size, ironed without starch. Punched into shape as unceremoniously as a vaudeville act, Shakespeare's one-acters--runoff seven times a day--perk up.

Only one falls flat. That nobody can do anything with the puerile plot of The Comedy of Errors was shown this season when Rodgers & Hart found it the snag in their otherwise delightful The Boys from Syracuse. But the Old Globe's The Taming of the Shrew picks up enormously by having Kate take the count within 45 minutes, becomes, indeed, an exuberant comic-strip courtship. Best of the four productions is A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Missing is its air of fairyland, all but missing its marvelous moon-drenched poetry. But largely missing too are Hermia and Helena and their supporting cast of bores. What remains are the comic ad-ventures of Bottom and his fellow bumpkins, culminating in the uproarious production of Pyramus & Thisbe before the Duke. To many in the first-night audience, Shakespeare seemed almost as good as Billy Rose's Aquacade.

For Margaret Webster, newsreel-length Shakespeare was a light chore at the end of a heavy season. Besides laboring at the Maurice Evans Hamlet and Henry IV Part I, she directed the current Family Portrait, plays Mary Magdalene in it. The most powerful new director in the U. S. theatre, Margaret Webster is bold, witty, imaginative. She does not approach Shakespeare on bended knee, but gives him a hearty slap on the back.

Blue-eyed, reddish-haired Director Webster was born--"a small tangerine-colored object"--34 years ago in Manhattan. On both sides she comes of English actors : famed Dame May Whitty is her mother, Shakespearean Actor Ben Webster her father. Acting since childhood, Margaret Webster slid into directing because the field was less crowded, but admits she prefers acting. Though she professionally directed a score of plays in England, it was in the U. S. three years ago, with Evans' Richard II, that she first directed Shakespeare. Directing plans for next year: Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. Some day: Shakespeare's Troilus and, Cressida, Macbeth.

Margaret Webster finds Broadway much more exciting than London, though she protests that Broadway still reveals "an awful hangover from what the Shuberts did in 1910." Her favorite U. S. directors are Guthrie McClintic (Mamba's Daughters), Herman Shumlin (The Little Foxes), but she. has no desire to be, as they are, a producer as well. Acting, directing, adapting plays, writing a book about her family keep her pleasantly occupied.

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