Old Play in Manhattan

When Maurice (rhymes with Horace) Evans returned to Broadway this month in Richard II, critics reiterated what theatregoers did not need to be told: that here was the outstanding Shakespearean actor of the day. In the three years since he had first electrified Broadway as Richard Evans had crossed and recrossed the U. S. like a moving torch, playing Shakespeare (usually to packed houses) some 700 times. Such a three-year record the U. S. has rarely seen.

The record is the more remarkable in that Evans tackled Shakespeare the hard way. Instead of giving audiences the usual chestnuts, he chose Henry IV, Part I, which (except for a one-week Players revival) had not been produced on Broadway for 44 years; Richard II, which had not been produced on Broadway for 60; and an uncut Hamlet which had never been produced on Broadway at all.

The record is the more remarkable also in that Evans is far from a great actor.

His playing has little inwardness and no depth, but precisely because it is showy and spirited, it goes over big. An accomplished showman, Evans disdains jazz effects; instead, he scores Shakespeare richly for full orchestra, achieves a Stokowski-like splendor of sound.

Evans' Richard is still his best role--far better than his too-muscular Hamlet (whom Evans makes into more of a Great Dane than a melancholy one), far better suited to his talents than his not-deeply-stained-enough Falstaff. "A rough draft of Hamlet," Richard has been called; and though the vain, foppish English king lacks the charm and nobility of the Danish prince, both love words and fear action, both procrastinate, both are full of self-pity and self-mockery.

Evans makes the weakling Richard understandable, turns him--as his fortunes fail--into a pathetic if not sympathetic figure. Since the play is short on action but rich in language, it offers Evans his greatest chance to exploit his best asset--his melodious High-Church voice. When Evans took Richard II to Broadway early in 1937, this story of an abdicating English king gained piquancy and pathos because another English king had just abdicated. It goes on being effective with no help from the Windsors.

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