New Play in Manhattan

The Eagle Has Two Heads (translated from the French of Jean Cocteau by Ronald Duncan; produced by John C. Wilson) and, what's more remarkable, flies backwards. Famed French Avant-Gardist Cocteau's "romantic melodrama" is outdated purple-&-plush palace theatrics, which starts off with a poet-revolutionist plunging through a window into the royal boudoir, and winds up with a dying queen toppling headlong down a vast flight of stairs.

The queen (Tallulah Bankhead) has been living secludedly, half in love with easeful Death, for the ten years since her young husband was assassinated on their honeymoon. But she and the poet (Helmut Dantine) who has now come to assassinate her, fall madly in love. He rouses her to life, prompts her to assert her will in her conspiracy-ridden kingdom, then cowers at the thought that their love cannot last. Finding that he has taken poison, the queen goads him into shooting her.

When an almost oppressively sophisticated writer turns out so highfalutin a play, there may well be method, even if there is no meaning, in his claptrap. Very possibly Cocteau meant to polish up a lot of passe heroics into a rococo extravaganza that would be lively theater to boot. And very possibly The Eagle Has Two Heads is full of brilliant rhetoric, in French. But on Broadway it is just a grimly gaudy bore. Nor, for all her fire and force, can Actress Bankhead act it the one way that might be effective--with high artifice, in the immensely grand manner.

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