Another Language

THE LADY'S NOT FOR BURNING (95 pp.)--Christopher Fry--Oxford ($2.50).

Except to actors in search of a role, most plays in book form are dull reading. Without props or actors to create illusion and vitality, they make an intolerable demand on the average reader's imagination. A Shakespeare becomes an exception through an excess of sheer creative power, a Shaw through saucy verbal glitter, but so far there has been just one Shakespeare and one Shaw. With The Cocktail Party, T. S. Eliot moved very close to the select circle of playwrights who can be read with pleasure. With The Lady's Not for Burning, Britain's Christopher Fry (TIME, April 3) edges past him into the circle itself. Written in verse with a fine sense of theater, The Lady is a play that needs no theater illusions to put a dazzle on its language. The dazzle is already there.

Unlike Eliot, Playwright Fry writes to the heart more than to the head, with a controlled, compassionate irony that rates love above every other human emotion. Not only does he dare to be exuberantly romantic, he dares it in verse. And he dares to reach for timeless meanings rather than immediate credulities by making the time 1400, "either more or less or exactly," and the setting an ordinary English market town called Cool Clary.

The plot is poetically simple. Thomas Mendip, a soldier returned from the wars in Flanders, comes to Cool Clary and finds a witch hunt in progress. Sick of man's inhumanity to man, and without the slightest notion who the witch is, he creates a diversion for her benefit. He describes himself as the murderer of two village characters and demands that he be hanged forthwith. Then the witch turns out to be beautiful. That the beautiful Jennet Jourdemayne and Soldier Thomas fall in love, and that their love laughs at faggots and hangmen, are matters that Poet Fry makes as right as the place his heart is in.

The real triumph of this brief, flashing play lies in its speech, a combination of unabashed medieval richness and 20th Century directness. When the mayor's sister, hearing the bells of the witch hunt, casually remarks, "Oh! -- dear; another?" Thomas Mendip is appalled and angered by her lack of heart:

Your innocence is on at such a rakish

angle

It gives you quite an air of iniquity.

By the most naked of compassionate

angels

Hadn't you better answer that bell? With

a mere

Clouding of your unoccupied eyes,

madam,

Or a twitch of the neck: what better use

can we put

Our faces to than to have them express

kindness

While we're thinking of something else?

Oh, be disturbed,

Be disturbed, madam, to the extent of a

tut

And I will thank God for civilization.

The Lady's Not for Burning has wit and comic relief as well as heart, and it has declarations of love such as no living playwright has found the language for. When Thomas deprecatingly says of himself:

Is there a slut would hold

This in her arms and put her lips against

it?

Jennet answers:

Sluts are only human . . .

You may be decay and a platitude

Of flesh, but I have no other such mem-

ory of life.

You may be corrupt as ancient apples,

well then

Corruption is what I most willingly

harvest.

You are Evil, Hell, the Father of Lies;

if so

Hell is my home and my days of good

were a holiday;

Hell is my hill and the world slopes

away from it

Into insignificance. I have come sud-

denly

Upon my heart and where it is I see no

help for.

London theatergoers, highbrow and low, have already learned that such language delivered by fine actors is tremendously moving stuff. While U.S. audiences wait for the chance to see Fry's play next autumn, they can have the shine of it at the nearest bookstore.

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