Grand Finale

It was their third and last bill. So far, England's Old Vic had given Broadway some good Shakespeare and some dubious Chekhov (TIME, May 20, 27). But last week they gave Broadway its greatest theatrical experience in years. Reaching back 25 centuries to Sophocles, they bodied forth, as superb theater, as searing tragedy, his Oedipus the King.

They had chosen one of the very few things in the world that are both great and perfect. As playwriting, Oedipus is as compact as dynamite. As drama, it tramples down its own large horrors, mounting to a world of austere terror beyond them. All the blind helplessness of man's fate is in it, and all the tragic suffering of his meeting it.

The play opens some years after the wayfaring Oedipus has been made King of Thebes for solving the famous riddle of the Sphinx.* Now pestilence ravages Thebes because of a polluting presence within its walls; and Oedipus sternly decrees that the polluter be identified and driven out.

Slowly, inexorably, the evidence as it piles up points to Oedipus himself--to Oedipus who, foredoomed to commit atrocious crimes, has despite all precautions unknowingly murdered his father Laius and married his mother Jocasta. When the last nail of proof is driven solidly home, Oedipus, in an agony of guilt and horror, blinds himself and goes forth, a beggar, to roam the world.

The Old Vic's performers--using the late, great Poet William Butler Yeats's excellent translation--caught the clenched force of the play, and the grand dimensions. They played daringly, theatrically, with no mingy concessions to "realism"; but they tempered their intensity with style.

As Oedipus, Laurence Olivier was extremely fine. He was first kingly and high-mettled, of unshakable purpose and swift anger. Then, twisting and turning between confidence and fear, he became both less and larger, a tragic figure of an early world, uttering at the climax two primitive animal howls that no one who heard them will ever forget.

Dividing the bill with Oedipus--and seeming as incongruous as a fashionable charm dangling from a severely classic bracelet--was Sheridan's 18th Century burlesque of the theater, The Critic. Ragging the playwright's vanity and the critic's venom, kidding the knee breeches off the bombast that then held the stage, The Critic is frequently amusing but fatally long. The Old Vic gave it as bright a production as Broadway is likely to see, and tossed in perhaps the most amazing quick-change that Broadway has ever seen. Half an hour after he had vanished as Oedipus, with blinded, bleeding eyes. Actor Olivier turned up once more to rattle gaily and delightfully as that accomplished chatterbox, Mr. Puff.

*The riddle: what walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, on three toward night? The answer: Man (who crawls as an infant, walks erect in his prime, leans on a stick in old age).

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