New Plays in Manhattan

Edward, My Son (by Robert Morley & Noel Langley; produced by Gilbert Miller & Henry Sherek) should repeat on Broadway the great success and long run (since May 1947) which it has had in London. It is that juicy mixture of about one part truth to two parts tripe known as good theater--that plumb sort of playwriting which is really just scene-writing. It gives two excellent English actors (Co-Playwright Morley and Peggy Ashcroft)* excellent opportunities to act.

The play chronicles the brilliant, unprincipled career of an Englishman who will stoop to any low trick out of love for his son. The theme:

I could not love thee, Dear, so much,

Loved I not honor less.

For young Edward's sake, Arnold Holt commits arson, practices blackmail, ditches his mistress, makes a wreck of his wife, blarneys the girl Edward has got with child. Edward himself, not much good to begin with and monstrously spoiled, turns into a wastrel who is killed in the war.

Edward never appears in the play, which is probably wise as well as ingenious, for the play really scores as the whopping success story of a ruthless charmer who begins as a small shopkeeper faced with bankruptcy and winds up a potentate and peer of the realm. With bright humor and a sort of icy gaiety, Holt gambles, soft-soaps, bludgeons, picklocks his way out of scrapes and up the ladder. And the play's interest really lies much less in whom he does it for than in how he does it; the Edward role seems a bit of a phony as well as a phantom.

The play does not lack insight, but its real allegiance is to the footlights, with their richer-than-life diet of emotions. As Holt, indeed, Actor Morley sinks his teeth into the role as though it were an ear of corn dripping with butter--which, theatrically, it is. As Holt's wife, Actress Ash-croft--turning from a happy young mother into a blotchy old drunk--has a fat acting part too; but for brief seconds here & there, she is so good that she gives it the pinched look of tragedy.

Time for Elizabeth (by Norman Krasna & Groucho Marx; produced by Russell Lewis & Howard Young) was a tin-and-cardboard comedy which was meant to be box office but turned out to be a bore. Closing after eight performances, it showed little of what its collaborators are best known for: Groucho Marx, as playwright, lacked the divine madness he displays as a performer; while the smooth Krasnagraph that reeled off Dear Ruth and John Loves Mary badly needed oiling.

*Both of whom were last seen on Broadway in the '305: Morley in Oscar Wilde, Miss Ashcroft in High Tor.

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