Old Play in Manhattan

Twelfth Night (by William Shakespeare; produced by Roger Stevens) has its immortal virtues--speeches filled with fragrance, bewitching songs. In Viola it has a charming heroine; in Malvolio, "sick of self-love," a monumental pompous ass. To him, as a huffing spoilsport, is addressed one of Shakespeare's crispest queries: "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" To him, by a frisking clown, is tossed some of Shakespeare's tersest wisdom: "There is no darkness but ignorance." And nowhere more than in Twelfth Night can a lovely moment suddenly leap out of the crudest horseplay.

But time, public taste and a certain original insouciance on Shakespeare's part have conspired against Twelfth Night. Particularly in the theater, the strands of its complicated plot can come to seem like chains. With its dead characters who are actually alive, its young gentlemen who are really young ladies, its adored one who is really twins, its love-making that is really leg-pulling, the play swarms with rather impractical jokes. Then there are Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, those relentless cutups whom a later age would have relegated to the funny papers. They also have a way of dragging Malvolio--a great comic figure by virtue of being almost tragic--down to their own level.

That pretty much happened last week to the Malvolio of Arnold Moss which, after a promising start, grew broader at every appearance. The production in general was forthright, with Frances Reid attractively girlish, even where she should have been boyish, as Viola. If the evening wasn't a great deal of fun, it was perhaps because a forthright Twelfth Night is often little better than a fourth-rate one. The situation calls for magic.

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