Sinner & Saint

Glowed the London News Chronicle:

"The funniest Falstaff in living recollection, and the best." The solemn Times intoned: "Great."

This was whopping praise, in a land where Shakespeare is almost a trade and understatement almost a trademark. The target was 43-year-old Actor Ralph Richardson in the Old Vic's smash revival of Henry IV, with Sybil Thorndike and Laurence Olivier in supporting roles.

Richardson himself had suspected that his Falstaff was going to be a failure. Only once since his teens had he seen the role performed. He had read very little about it, and he was "terrified by the enormous size of the character. . . ." But he constantly remembered Falstaff's "I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men." No mere butt, no mere burlesque, Richardson's fat knight is a restrained, highly intelligent, altogether conscious comedian, an artful creator of merriment. Hence his final fall from grace seems not pathetic but tragic.

Dost thou hear, Hal? thou knowest in the state of innocency Adam fell; and what should poor Jack Falstaff do in the days of villainy? Thou seest I have more flesh than another man, and therefore more frailty. . . .

A mainstay of Old Vic repertory, Actor Richardson is currently playing lead in two of its other productions, Arms and the Man and Uncle Vanya. He and his great friend, Actor Olivier, split the big male roles, as a team are unmatched today on the British stage.

An artist's son, Richardson started acting at 18, has seldom been without a part since. A hardworking, not very confident, thoroughly un-actory actor, he trudged slowly to the top, has also made a name for himself in British cinema (The Citadel, The Silver Fleet). In 1935 he made his only U.S. appearance, as Mercutio in the Katharine Cornell Romeo and Juliet. In 1939 he joined the Fleet Air Arm, "flew all day and never thought of anything. I was deaf as an adder and had a wonderful appetite." Last year he and his fellow flyer, Olivier, were released to revive the blitzed Old Vic.

According to his friend J. B. Priestley, who has written a couple of plays for him (Cornelius, Johnson Over Jordan), Actor Richardson could have been equally as successful as a painter or a writer if he had put his far-better-than-average-actor's mind to it.

Offstage Richardson is a complete homebody, living near Hampstead Heath with his wife and infant son. He is never seen in nightspots, and totes books to the theater to read between acts. He has never been rich, never--in his own estimation--poor: "I've been down to five pounds, but then that's quite a lot."

Other verse than Shakespeare's is playing to packed houses in London. Going great guns again, after shutting down for the duration, is the all-poetry Mercury Theater, which began in the '30s with T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral.

Mercury's current hit, The Way to the Tomb by Cornish Farmer Ronald Duncan, has St. Anthony as its topic, modern materialism for its target. The first half of the play, an austere masque, tells of Anthony's attempts to find God. The three monks who feed him, sing to him and argue with him represent his three temptations (the belly, the senses and intellectual pride); but even when he conquers fleshly pleasures through a death-fast, he has still to cast out the sin of pride.

And what is fear? It is conceit: Knowing sufficient of the future to dislike it. And insufficient to ignore it, it is self-love implicit.

The second half of the play satirizes a group of modern debunkers who skeptically visit St. Anthony's tomb, gloatingly find it empty. But after they have gone Anthony reappears, praising the faith of a poor postcard hawker who has continued to believe in him.

Though slow-paced and undramatic, The Way to the Tomb wins audiences (including Queen Mary) by its poetry and philosophy, wakes up even the drowsy when its ultra modern scoffers speak verse that smacks of a smart revue:

I fear the time When the phone is cut, When the tank runs dry And the flick is shut.

I fear the time When my book is read, When I've nothing to do But say what's said.

I fear the time When I'll wake up dead And find death all dull Like a day in bed.

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