Old Plays in Manhattan

For two months the excitement along Broadway had been mounting. At the tail end of a lively but not very lustrous season there loomed one of the brightest theatrical events in years: England's world-famous Old Vic was arriving for six weeks of repertory, with such topnotchers in its cast as Laurence Olivier (TIME, April 8) and Ralph Richardson (TIME, Dec. 31). On the morning last month when the box office first opened, double lines of ticket buyers stretched for blocks; and by the evening last week when the first curtain rose on Henry IV, Part I, the advance sale had reached nearly $250,000.

The extraordinarily glittering first-night audience that had paid $12 a seat--in some cases less to see than to be seen-- trooped back, virtually en masse, the next night. Then it had the very rare opportunity of witnessing Henry IV, Part II-- last produced on Broadway in 1867. The Old Vic had clearly started off with its heaviest artillery./- But when the boom and smoke had subsided, there was no doubt that it had won the engagement.**

It was no easy engagement to win. The seven-hour whole of Henry IV is a magnificent but multiform, a spacious but sprawling stage piece. Large as it is, even the two-part play is a rounded fragment of something larger--of that turbulent pageant of ambition and treachery, of glory and vainglory, known as Shakespeare's chronicle plays. Even that greatest asset of Henry IV--the bestriding presence of Falstaff--remains a possible peril, for it requires notable performing to do him justice.

Part Score. Dramatically, Part I beats Part II all hollow. It is more tightly knit, it moves with greater speed and swell, and it traces the upward curve of most of its characters' destinies. Falstaff, still the boon companion of the errant, frivoling Prince Hal, swaggers and swills in rich midsummer plenty. In a flare of eloquence and arms, the rebellion against Henry IV, led by the heedless, dauntless Hotspur, progresses to the plains of Shrewsbury, where the day is lost.

In Part II events move downward, and the drama becomes muffled and intermittent. Hotspur lies slain by Hal; the rebels are betrayed and broken; guilt-laden Henry, who had usurped Richard II's crown, sickens and dies; Falstaff roisters now without his Prince, "Who-when he becomes his King--brutally dismisses him. Only for Hal does glory lie ahead.

Acting out this long, congested story, the Old Vic remembered first & foremost that it was Shakespeare. It offered no tricks or natty novelties; its only freedom was to build Part II around Falstaff, partly concealing lumpy drama in lively theater.

Here & there the Old Vic proved disappointing. For a great repertory company, it had more than its quota of indifferent actors; there was no great distinction in their rendering of speech or verse. (The musicomedy-sized Century Theater made for hearing trouble.) But they had the main thing--a real Shakespearean robustiousness. In Part I they contrived a fine balance between the historical scenes and the humorous ones, a telling contrast between that arch-romantic and exemplar of heraldic honor, Hotspur, and that arch-realist and epitome of worldly wisdom, Falstaff. And they had for this two brilliant actors.

Actor Olivier's Hotspur was no ranting hothead, but a feudal lord with tremendous dash--gay, sarcastic, masterful. (In Part II Actor Olivier turned up delightfully as that "forked radish," gaunt, garrulous Justice Shallow.)

Actor Richardson's Falstaff was very likely the best that this generation had seen. It caught the lustiness as well as the wit. Falstaff was indeed "that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts" in the chambers of whose brain, as Hazlitt quoted, "it snows of meat and drink." Whether playing dead or playing the hero, making light of honor or rhapsodizing about sack, impersonating the King or embracing blowzy Doll Tearsheet (amusingly played by Joyce Redman), he rolled through the play, the greatest comic figure in English literature.

/- Old Vic productions this week and following weeks: Sophocles' Chekhov's Oedipus Rex, Uncle Vanya; a Sheridan's twin The bill Critic. of The Old Vic will also make four hour-long broadcasts, starting May 26.

**One casualty: Critic Burton Rascoe, who didn't like the show, and who quit as World-Telegram drama critic when his paper refused to print his stinging first-night review.

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